Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 9780520910188, 0520910184

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Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945

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Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945

Gail Lee Bernstein

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley LosAngeles London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1991 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Recreating Japanese women, 1600—1945 / edited

| with an introduction by Gail Lee Bernstein. p- cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-07017-8 (alk. paper) 1. Women—Japan—History. 2. Feminism— JjJapan—History. 3. Women—Employment—

Japan—History. I. Bernstein, Gail Lee. HQ1762.R43 199]

305.42'0952—dc20 90-11194 CIP

Printed in the United States of America :

98765 The paper used in this publication meets the

minimum requirements of American

National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

To the memory of Dr. Sharon H. Nolte (1948-1987), whose sudden death at the age of thirty-eight deprived the field of Japanese history of one of its most promising young scholars, and the contributors to this book of a respected and cherished colleague and friend

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Contents

Preface / ix

Introduction Gail Lee Bernstein | 1

PART ONE - WOMEN AND THE FAMILY: 1600-1868 1. Women and Changes in the Household Division of Labor Kathleen S. Uno / 17

2. The Life Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan Anne Walthall | 42

3. The Deaths of Old Women: Folklore and Differential Mortality in Nineteenth-Century Japan Laurel L. Cornell / 71

4. The Shingaku Woman: Straight from the Heart Jennifer Robertson | 88

5. Female Bunjin: The Life of Poet-Painter Ema Saik6 Patricia Fister | 108 6. Women in an All-Male Industry: The Case of Sake Brewer Tatsu’uma Kiyo _ Joyce Chapman Lebra / 131

PART TWO - THE MODERN DISCOURSE ON FAMILY, GENDER, AND WORK: 1868-1945 7. The Meiji State’s Policy Toward Women, 1890-1910 Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings / 151

8. Yosano Akiko and the Taishé6 Debate over the “New Woman” Laurel Rasplica Rodd / 175 vu

vit CONTENTS | Margit Nagy / 199

9. Middle-Class Working Women During the Interwar Years

10. Activism Among Women in the Taish6 Cotton Textile Industry Barbara Molony / 217

11. ‘The Modern Girl as Militant Miriam Silverberg / 239

12. Doubling Expectations: Motherhood and Women’s Factory Work Under State Management in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s Yoshtko Miyake | 267

13. Women and War: The Japanese Film Image William B. Hauser / 296

Afterword Jane Caplan / 315 Glossary / 323

Contributors / 325 Index / 329

Preface ;

This multidisciplinary collection of studies based on original research by

Japan specialists focuses on the definition of Japanese women’s roles over the last three hundred and fifty years, from the Tokugawa era to the end of the Second World War. Contributors to the volume have drawn on a rich and varied body of primary source materials, including poetry, folklore, oral history, religious teachings, screenplays, government publications, newspapers, and popular magazines, to describe the various forces and agents of change in the construction.of Japanese women and to explore the gap between the feminine ideal and the reality of women’s lives in that country. Organized chronologically and centered specifically on the cultural construction of gender, the thirteen chapters constitute a history of the evolution of female roles and feminine identity in Japan. Our book originated in a three-hour panel on Japanese women’s history held at the annual meeting of the Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in Park City, Utah, in the fall of 1986. The common themes that emerged from that panel encouraged us to expand and elaborate on our research at the following year’s meeting in Tucson, Arizona. By the time we left Park City, we had already discussed putting out a book centered on changing definitions of Japanese womanhood, and we even had a tentative title: Recreating Japanese Women.

At the Tucson conference in 1987, the original group of panelists— Bernstein, Lebra, Molony, Rodd, Silverberg, Uno, and Walthall—were joined by Cornell, Hastings, Miyake, and Nagy. In an afternoon work“x

x PREFACE shop following panel presentations, several other Japan scholars, women’s history specialists, and advanced graduate students participated in an extensive critique of all the papers and worked to sharpen the thematic focus of the book. Although Robertson was unable to attend, she later sent her paper to the others for their comments. We acquired two more contributors the following year when we invited William B. Hauser to share his work on women in wartime films and Patricia Fister to discuss one of the women artists represented in her exhibit “Japanese Women Artists, 1600-1900,” which many of us had the good fortune of seeing at the University of Kansas Spencer Museum in April 1988 while attending the Rocky Mountain/Southwest Japan Regional Seminar meeting. The final contributor, European histo-

rian Jane Caplan, joined our project at the end of 1989, when she graciously agreed to provide an Afterword that would help integrate our research findings with theories developed in the study of women in the Western world.

Our common endeavor greatly benefited from the support of the University of Arizona. A grant from the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute helped defray ‘the considerable phiotocépying and postage costs. The Departinent of History's manuscript typist, Mary Stie Passé-Smith, applied her geriitis to the task of merging thirteen chapters typed; on various disks ‘into one unified’ manuscript, enhanced by her typing and editing skills. And Shizuko Radbill, the Japan librarian in thé Oriental Collection, placéd her éxpert research skills and ‘the resources of the ‘Collection’ at our disposal: As ‘always, ‘Michael Patrick’ Sullivan stood réady to provide practical, émotional, atid intellectual support: “We owe a special word of thanks to‘Irwin Scheiner for his thoughtful,

perceptive reading of the entire manuscript and ‘his ‘valuable recotii~ mendations for revision: The staff of the Press gave us the’advantage of éxpert editing, helping pull tdgether ‘the style and’ substance ‘of ‘this book. In the end, of course, any errors are our responsibility." “We should ‘also like to express our appreciation to’the ‘pedple who participated as discussants ‘in the Tucson’ workshop: ‘Robert J. Smith, Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, and Stéfan Tanaka, then Japan Staff Associate of ‘thé ‘Social Science Reséarch Council, offered many helpful ‘suggestions. University of Ari! zona historians Tessie Liu and Karen Andérsof lent a valuable coitiparative perspective. We benefited from criticisms madé by Betty Brummal and Barbara Mori, and from the minutés prepared by rapporteur Pam-

elaGilbreathe | | a OO

a ‘One other Japai specialist who had planned’ to join us, for the workshop was Sharon Hamilton Nolte. She contributed a paper to' our first conférence in Utah, though at the last minute she was unable to attend. During the summer of 1987, shortly. before the workshop, she died suddenly from an aneurism of the brain.

PREFACE xt Sharon’s husband, Reid Nolte, entrusted her academic papers to her friends and colleagues Ann Waltner, Anne Walthall, and Sally Hastings.

The one unpublished manuscript that Sharon left was the chapter she intended to contribute to this volume. It was agreed that Sally Hastings should revise the manuscript for publication. The Midwest Japan Seminar, for which Sharon had been scheduled to write a paper, discussed the draft at its meeting on September 21, 1987. Sally Hastings presided at that meeting and attended our workshop in Sharon’s place. In order to answer criticisms raised in those two discussions and to relate Sharon’s manuscript to the others in the book, Sally added more material and rewrote the paper: essentially she recast and expanded the material to make Sharon’s major points clearer and more convincing. Because Sally Hastings’s contribution exceeded that usually encompassed by the

term “editor,” we thought it appropriate that she add her name as coauthor of the paper. Sharon Nolte’s academic work was of very high quality, and it was central to her life. Had she lived, she undoubtedly would have produced a pioneering book on women and the state in modern Japan. It is altogether fitting that we honor her by dedicating this volume to her memory.

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Introduction Gail Lee Bernstein

Japanese women’s lives, like those of women everywhere and in every time, have been shaped by a multitude of factors. The many forces that have affected their fate include their position within the family (and the nature of the family system itself); their social class standing; the

predominant religious and social values of their society; and the pre- , vailing legal, economic, and political institutions. These have changed continuously over the course of Japanese history, altering women’s status and the roles they were expected to play. It makes little sense,

_ therefore, to talk about Japanese women as though they formed a monolithic, unchanging group. Even within one historical time period, the lives of an upper-class woman, a merchant woman, and a female servant in a wealthy farm family were worlds apart in terms of work, clothing, norms of behavior, and the countless other indicators of stan-

dard of living, status, position—in short, life experience. Indeed, the | distinction between femininity and masculinity itself has varied. Gender has been continuously recreated. We are specifically concerned here with the creation of female gender. How has womanhood been defined and redefined over the past 350 years? Who did the defining? What gave femaleness its meaning? And what caused changes in the common understanding of differences be-

tween femininity and masculinity? Our underlying assumption is that Following East Asian practice, Japanese surnames precede given names in this book, except in cases of Japanese scholars whose English-language works are cited or who reside in the West and observe the Western practice of giving surnames last. Unless otherwise indicated, Tokyo is the place of publication of all Japanese references.

I

2 GAIL LEE BERNSTEIN gender, unlike sex, is not a biological given but is, in the words of Evelyn Fox Keller, “a socially constructed and culturally transmitted organizer

of our inner and outer worlds.”! Whereas sex roles refer merely to the fixed range of capabilities of female and male genitalia,? gender roles are sociohistorical conventions of deportment arbitrarily attributed to either females or males. “Women” and “men” are culturally created categories.* Our goal is to understand continuity and change in Japanese ideals of femininity, in the processes by which women were trained to approximate these ideals, and in the ways their actual roles diverged from these ideals. Our starting point, the Tokugawa or Edo period (1600-1868), is variously viewed as the traditional, late feudal, or early modern period of Japanese history. During this time the Tokugawa military house, which had its capital in Edo (present-day Tokyo), monopolized the title of shégun and ruled over lesser military houses. Below the hereditary military

. (samurai) class were three other fixed social or occupational classes— peasant, artisan, and merchant (in descending order of social status)— as well as numerous other groups, such as physicians, artists, and a court aristocracy, who did not fit precisely into any of these four official classes.

Members of one class could not legally intermarry with members of other classes or change their occupational status. Thus, merchants could not become samurai, and samurai could not farm; peasants were forbidden from leaving their land and migrating to the cities to engage in trade. By the eighteenth century, many of these restrictions were honored more in the breach. Nevertheless, the hierarchical social class system,

reinforced by Confucian philosophical thought, dominated people’s thinking about social relations and elevated elders, males, and officials above other members of society. Even after the abolition of feudal class

| distinctions in the late nineteenth century, an age- and gender-based hierarchy still held to varying degrees, both in society at large and

within the family. — | | | oe _ Because Japanese society, unlike American society, has been rela-

tively homogeneous but highly rank-conscious, especially in the Tokugawa period, Japanese women’s experience of womanhood historically had more to do with social class and biological age than it did with race, Oo], Evelyn Fox Keller, “Making Gender Visible in the Pursuit of Nature’s Secrets,” in F eminist' Studies/Critical Studies, ed. ‘Feresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1986), 67. . _ . eo,

2. See Carol Vance, “Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol Vance (Boston:. Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1985), 9. ° SO . : oe | 7

3. linda Gordon discusses the history of women’s history, including the notion of gen-

der, in “What’s New in Women’s History,” in de Lauretis (ed:),; Feminist Studies/Critical Studtes, Chap. 2.

INTRODUCTION 3 religion, or ethnicity. A woman’s socioeconomic position,’ in turn, was

determined by her family’s social standing. Most people lived and worked within the family, which remained the basic unit of society. Therefore, any discussion of women and gender construction must cen-

ter ‘on the family system. : : : The ideal family in the Tokugawa period, as Uno (chapter 1) de-

scribes it, was the ze,.the stem-family household, which retained only one

child as heir in each generation: More than a biological unit, the ze is frequently defined as a corporate entity in the sense that it embraced nonkin (servants, adopted heirs, and the like) as well as blood relations (grandparents, their married heir, and his or her unmarried children). The ie also connoted household property, domestic animals, ancestors, and such intangibles as family reputation. Like a well-established bustness, the ze was devoted to its own perpetuation.

_ Although most, but not all, households were headed by a male as dictated by custom and law, Confucian teachings about filial piety gave older women a full measure of respect and care from junior household members, male as well as female. That respect was rooted ‘not only in the older women’s seniority but also in the influence and authority they earned during their life by demonstrating loyalty to the family and competence in the performance of household tasks and the preservation. of harmony among family members. Hard physical labor in the fields and in the kitchen, an accommodating nature, and good relations with inlaws: these were the qualities expected of young wives in Japan’s largely

agrarian society. So : Although all women were expected to marry, childbearing was not

necessarily a woman’s primary obligation. While children, and especially sons, were essential to the continuity of the ze and the care of the elderly, the Japanese family system had ways to compensate for tnfertility and infant mortality. Adoption of sons, of sons-in-law, and even of married couples guaranteed heirs, as did the custom of designating daughters as heirs. Thus, from the Tokugawa period and earlier to well into the twentieth century, womanhood was not primarily equated with motherhood, and motherhood was not necessarily: defined biolog-

ically. | 3 | : :

Nor was childrearing the “fundamental determining experience of womanhood.”* Uno argues that older women, such as grandmothers, and younger children, wet nurses, and servants all participated 1n child-

rearing, as did fathers and grandfathers. Since the household was an economic unit of production, both the family’s business and its'reproductive functions took place at home, where several generations living 4. See ibid., 96~27. In contrast, motherhood was the “fundamental defining experience of womanhood” for late-nineteenth-century feminists in the West.

4 GAIL LEE BERNSTEIN together under one roof participated in tasks crucial to the household’s survival.

Walthall (chapter 2) confirms Uno’s claim: at least for rich peasants, a woman’s “womb was... less significant than the ability to maintain the family’s fortune and reputation,” and the Japanese woman did this in part by serving as a competent household manager. Indeed, Confucian ideology discouraged the active participation of young mothers in their own children’s upbringing on the grounds that they were morally un-

suited to such a serious role or were likely to spoil their children. Women were thus valued as workers, wives, and especially daughters-

in-law, not solely as mothers. .

Of course, we cannot always assume that official teachings concerning gender were reflected in social reality, as Walthall’s copious documen-

tation of peasant women’s activities warns us. What women did (and what they got away with) was very different from socially prescribed norms, which usually were observed, if at all, by the small minority of women in the upper classes. The peasant women in Walthall’s study experienced lives of much greater freedom and diversity than the official ideology would lead us to believe. Depending on their economic circumstances, family composition, and myriad other factors, they might go to

school, travel, work for wages, choose their own marriage partners, enter into matrilocal marriages, marry men who were not heir to existing households and so help to found new households, divorce, remarry, engage in adulterous affairs, and serve as household heads. Promiscuous girls, barren wives, willful daughters-in-law, and divorcées all managed to survive relatively unstigmatized by village social sanctions. In fact, Walthall argues that precisely this flexibility in women’s roles ensured the survival of the family itself and its individual members. Nevertheless, the importance of women as wives and daughters-in-

law is a repeated theme in Japanese history since 1600, with demographic implications that Cornell spells out in her discussion of mortality rates for elderly women in Tokugawa Japan (chapter 3). Despite the inevitable tensions between the young wife and her mother-in-law, this dynamic relationship was crucial to the life expectancy of women. EIderly women living with a daughter-in-law, Cornell finds, were more likely to live longer, especially if the daughter-in-law was young and had produced grandchildren. Those without family fared less well. The giving of care to the elderly thus becomes an enduring theme in the defi-

nition of womanhood. The dutiful daughter-in-law appears in many guises throughout the pages of this volume, but whether breadwinner, farm laborer, or simply household manager, she typically engaged in these activities to support her husband’s family, including her long-lived mother-in-law.

} INTRODUCTION 5 What of women who did not marry out? Under what circumstances , could a woman resist becoming a daughter-in-law? And what were the

consequences of such unconventional behavior? Three examples of such women in the Tokugawa period appear in this volume: Robertson’s Shingaku (Heart Learning) teacher, Fister’s poet-painter, and Lebra’s sake brewer (chapters 4—6). Although the Shingaku movement carefully prescribed how women should behave to overcome congenital moral infirmities, not all Shingaku women performed according to their proper role. ‘This role consisted of acquiring such virtues as obedience, frugality, modesty, and purity, and was best done in the context of marriage—that is, in service to her husband’s family. “Marriage,” in Robertson’s words, “made possible a woman’s achievement of ‘female’ gender”: her female-likeness was premised and contingent on the marriage institution. Jion-ni Kenka, an eighteenth-century disciple of Shingaku, illustrates

a successful departure from the insistence that the only female-like woman was a married one (or a male Kabuki actor impersonating a woman). Resisting marriage, Kenka became first a Buddhist nun and then a disseminator of Shingaku teachings. Other female proselytizers spreading moral teachings about women’s proper role followed in her footsteps. But, as Robertson observes, “female disciples and teachers of Shingaku did not epitomize the Shingaku Woman, even though they participated in her construction.” A female-like woman was not supposed to be traveling around the country, even if her mission was to preach that the only female-like woman was a married one who stayed at home to serve her husband’s family! The religious life represented one legitimate alternative to marriage in the Tokugawa period, but there were others as well. Talented women could support themselves as professional entertainers, or geisha. A few gifted women were supported by their natal families. One example is the poet-painter Ema Saiko. A distinguished nineteenth-century bunjn, or scholar of Chinese studies, Ema was celebrated for her Chinese-style verse, calligraphy, and ink paintings. Throughout her life she remained under the wing of her doting father, himself a noted scholar and physician, and enjoyed the patronage of leading male artists of the day. By staying single, she avoided the strenuous obligations incumbent upon married women. As Fister points out, “The freedom from childbearing, ' conjugal domestic responsibilities, and manual labor allowed her to mature fully as an artist.” Nonetheless, as an adult this brilliant woman suffered pangs of regret for missing out on a “normal” married life. To the extent that Japanese women had a choice between pursuing a vocation or marrying, it was a painful one. Nevertheless, not all women had to make such an either/or decision. By entering into matrilocal,

6 GAIL LEE BERNSTEIN matrilineal marriages that enabled their families to “take a son-in-law,”

the female sake brewers in Lebra’s study managed to become wives while avoiding the domestic duties imposed on daughters-in-law. The traditions of the merchant class, especially in the Kansai area, apparently encouraged women to be active in their natal: family’s business. Lebra provides several examples of such female entrepreneurs, perhaps the. most outstanding of whom was Tatsu’uma Kiyo, whose “management strategies made her a pioneer in the [sake-brewing] industry dur-

ing its period of most rapid growth and prosperity.” : Kiyo circumvented customary constraints on active female participation in business by hiring male brewmasters and managers and by arranging marriages for her daughters that maximized the interests of the family business. “The practice of relying on wives and daughters to run the venerable family business,” Lebra reminds us, “was. already well established by the time Kiyo was born. Rather than automatically entrust-

ing the business to a son with questionable ability, merchant houses could select the most talented apprentice-clerk as an adopted husband for their daughter, thus ensuring the success and continuity of the fam-

ily business.” , :

Once again we see how preservation of the ze took precedence over all other considerations. We also see, however, that although family interests could and did severely restrict women, under certain circumstances, as the case of Kiyo illustrates, it could also justify the transgression of customs and laws that favored ‘men,.such as marital residence patterns, primogeniture, and head of household succession. ‘To be sure, women who became famous and powerful in their own right. were-not necessarily recognized or appreciated as such by their families or by society. Indeed, if, like Kenka, they succeeded by violating gender rales, they might be seen as dangerous. Tokugawa authorities regulated such roles and punished women who violated them. Kenka’s own father was dismayed by. her transgression of feminine norms of behavior. Whereas the family of Ema Saik6 to this day proudly honors its talented ancestor by preserving her artwork in their family collection, later generations of Kiyo’s sake-brewing family seem to have been embarrassed by her spectacular success im outwitting all other competitors: Their reticence to discuss. this entrepreneurial.matriarch and their failure to preserve records documenting her business achievements suggest a. lingering am-. bivalence toward women who succeeded in unconventional, nonpre-.

scribed ways... oo

. With the defeat.of the Tokugawa regime in the middle of the nineteenth century and the establishment of-a centralized nation-state, the mew Meyi leadership ushered in a host.of changes designed to rid Japan:

INTRODUCTION 7 of its feudal past and to set a course toward “enlightened civilization.” Thrown open to Western commerce and diplomatic contact, the longisolated island country underwent a bewildering series of reforms, including the dismantling of the four-class system, the abolition of feudal privileges, the introduction of universal compulsory education, and the promotion of industrialization. The Meiji period (1868-1912) was a time of questioning old customs and practices and of experimenting with new forms, frequently under Western influence. In this era of rapid change, it is not surprising that the question of women’s roles should come under scrutiny. The Meiji government, in its efforts to remake Japan imto a modern state, tried to take an active role in the creation of a new citizenry dedicated to the nation and loyal to the emperor. One aspect of this reformation was gender construction.

The aim of remaking Japanese women as part of the remaking of Japan was captured in the slogan “Good Wife, Wise Mother” (ryésaz kenbo) promoted by bureaucrats in the new government. Here for the first time, the definition of womanhood at least partly in terms of motherhood gained legitimacy. The words “wise mother” signaled the newly recognized importance of educating all women so that they could better perform their home duties, and in particular childrearing in accordance with “the latest scientific knowledge and practice.” In a significant departure, the new state’s pronouncements on gender, by addressing all women, “gradually replaced the premodern differentiation of women by class.” ‘The new ideal woman represented a composite of the “cardinal feminine virtues of the various Japanese classes.” All women, for example, were enjoined to practice frugality in order to contribute to the nation’s savings for investment in modern industry. This “constellation of virtues”—modesty, courage, frugality, literacy, hard work, and productivity—was “so appropriate for economic growth” that Nolte and

Hastings (chapter 7) call it a “cult of productivity.” 5; ,

Still, Nolte and Hastings warn us that it would be wrong to confuse the “Good Wife, Wise Mother” slogan still current in Japan with the cult of: domesticity popularized in present-day Japan and in Victorian England. Not all Meiji women were necessarily expected to confine themselves to kitchen and nursery. Middle- and upper-class women ideally engaged in charitable and patriotic activities as well, and: lower-class women .of necessity worked outside the home 1n factories vital to the nation’s economic development. Indeed, the state’s view of the family as “an essential building block of the national structure” in effect turned the home into a “public place”—the state writ small, blurring distinctions between public.and private. Women’s vital function as corner-

stones of the family:made them civil servants of sorts.

8 GAIL LEE BERNSTEIN Legal support for this view of women and the family came from the Meyi Civil Code of 1898, which established the samurai ideal of the ze as the national standard for the family and reinforced the legal authority of the household head, who was usually male. The code legally sub- ordinated women to men in a number of ways: A wife needed her husband’s consent before entering into a legal contract. In cases of divorce, the husband took custody of the children. A wife’s adultery (but not her husband’s) constituted grounds for legal divorce and criminal prosecution. The household head’s permission was required before women under twenty-five (and men under thirty) could legally marry. Enforced until the end of the Second World War, the Meiji Code in

_ its treatment of women as wives reflected not so much the Confucian belief in a wife’s ineptness as the Meiji leaders’ efforts to “ensure the smooth operation of a male-centered, authoritarian traditional family”;

it did so by assuring that the family would not have two masters, just as “in the heavens there are not two suns.’> Thus a woman’s role, not her

sex, mandated her subordinate position. Indeed, precisely because women were so important to the family, and the family to the state, women were excluded from participation in politics on the grounds that, as in the case of public officials and schoolteachers, partisan politics was an inappropriate activity for them. They needed to concentrate all

of their energies on the management of the household, the education of their children, and the promotion of economic development. Yet

as late as the end of the Mey period, Nolte and Hastings remind us, the slogan “Good Wife, Wise Mother” connoted “Japanese state policy [that] placed much more importance on a woman’s responsibilities

as a wife [and as a kind of public servant] than on her function as mother.”

In the First World War era, increasing numbers of literate women graduating from Japan’s newly established national education system lent fresh voices to the national discourse on gender in Japan. ‘The privilege of defining femininity—which through most of world history has been limited to “priests and philosophers, physicians and politicians”*— was now seized by Japanese women themselves. By encouraging women’s creative talent, literary genius, and female sexuality, the “Bluestock-

ings” (Seit6) group described by Rodd (chapter 8) necessarily confronted the new ideology of the proper female role. Although these women did not consciously set out to be political, various organs of the 5. Margit Maria Nagy, “How Shall We Live? Social Change, the Family Institution, and Feminism in Prewar Japan” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1981), 41, quoting Ume Kenjir6, Minpé yogi (Yahikaku Shobo, 1908), 1:39. 6. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, eds., Connecting Spheres: Women tn the Western World, 1500 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press), 5.

INTRODUCTION 9 state, such as the Ministry of Education, the Home Ministry, and even the Metropolitan Police, accused their literary magazine, Seto, of “corrupt[ing] the virtues traditionally associated with Japanese women” and undermining the concept of “good wife, wise mother.” The state’s “ongoing ‘management’ ” of issues related to women and the family inevitably raised the question of the state’s role in protecting mothers and children.® If the positive valuation of motherhood in the debates over state protection seems conservative to Western femuinists today, it was certainly novel to early Taisho (1912-26) society. The traditional Japanese family had never stressed women’s mission as mothers

(and certainly had not argued for their biological superiority), but rather had stressed their duties as wives and daughters-in-law. And the Meiji government, its slogans notwithstanding, had not actually called for state support of mothers but, on the contrary, had solicited mothers’ support of the state. Not all Taish6 feminist writers, to be sure, considered motherhood to be “women’s heaven-ordained occupation.” The poet Yosano Akiko, herself the mother of ten, argued that, in Rodd’s words, “any human being should be allowed to take on as many roles as she or he can manage.”

What is remarkable, however, in all these women’s discussions of womanhood, is their contemporary ring: whether demanding state welfare to support the family or insisting on female suffrage, equal economic opportunity, freedom of education, and the right to express their individuality, feminists in early ‘Taisho Japan boldly explored the full range of possibilities for the “new woman.” Regardless of their particular point of view, women themselves, and not male sages or the

state, actively engaged in a lively discourse on the meaning of female , gender.

This discourse on gender did not take the form of words alone: . women helped stretch and shape the boundaries of socially sanctioned female behavior by their deeds as well. During the 1920s an increasing

number of women entered the workplace. Not only the unmarried daughters of the rural poor, but also the wives and daughters of the urban middle class—“respectable women’”—appeared at train stations on their way to jobs in department stores and office buildings, occasioning the alarm of bureaucrats concerned about the social implications of a growing female labor force. As Nagy (chapter 9) reports, “The phenomenon of the middle-class working woman created profound anxi7. Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern

Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 180. 8. Ibid., 226n.32.

10 GAIL LEE BERNSTEIN eties about the future of family life and national unity, especially since the middle class was viewed as the bastion of social stability in an era of social and political turmoil.” Married working women struck at the heart of family-state nationalism, the ideology that subsumed the interests of women within the family. and linked family stability to the preservation of national unity. Of course women, married and single, had always done productive work. But in the largely agrarian society of pre-twentieth-century Japan married women had worked on family farms or in family businesses, and single women had worked in factories on a temporary basis until marriage, in a pattern of labor known as “life-cycle service.”? Now even mid-

dle-class married women still in their childbearing years were working for pay outside the home. Could working wives and mothers continue to sustain family stability? Conversely, could the middle-class family in a decade of economic dislocation survive without the wife’s supplemental earnings? The outpouring of articles, surveys, and governmental studies on this subject in the 1920s testified to the importance of “women’s

issues”: the nature, status, and proper sphere of women in this decade became the preoccupation of bureaucrats, journalists, and women alike. Women’s entrance into urban public space inevitably forced redefinitions of the bounds of proper decorum traditionally associated with female gender. Nagy’s survey data on midde-class working women show

that they still wanted to live up to traditional role expectations: they feared sacrificing their femininity, and they hoped “not to lose their spe-

cial virtue as females” and to “cultivate accomplishments as a. future housewife.” Yet these surveys also indicate that at least some ‘middleclass working women welcomed employment as both a guarantee of eco-

nomic independence and an opportunity to develop themselves as individuals.

Further evidence for: this emerging autonomy among working women in the interwar period is presented in Molony’s chapter on activ-

ism among women in the Taisho cotton textile industry (chapter. 10). The factory workers’ decision to leave their rural families for employment in the mills shows that they refused to be passive victims; similarly, their agitation for better work conditions and participation in strikes belie the standard portrait of them as docile. Molony concludes that female factory workers by the 1920s and 1930s had developed considerable self-confidence and a sense of themselves as workers rather than simply as wives and daughters. Influenced by their education and by the activism of male workers, and hardened by their own work experiences,

155. :

9. L. L. Cornell, “Hajnal and the Household in Asia: A Comparativist History of the Family in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1870,” Journal of Family History 12, nos. 1—3 (1987):

-- INTRODUCTION: . Il they increasingly learned how to.make rational choices and to “deter-

mine their own economic and social conditions.” es

The growing sense of women’s. empowerment alluded to. the chapters by Nagy.and: Molony may help explain the public’s. fascination. with the “modern ‘girl’. (moga) of :1920s media. ‘This multivalent symbol, as Silverberg describes her (chapter 11), captured.all:the ambiguity associ-

ated with the emergence of autonomous, liberated working women in that decade. Depending on the perceiver, the moga was either the model of the very modern: woman: or. the epitome. of moral decadence. She challenged: age-old. definitions of femalelikeness: with her open. sexuality, her. public flirtatiousness, and above all-her independence from family—all by-products. of: her income-earning ability: if this “free-living and free-thinking” modern girl was.making history, Silverberg suggests;

it was “partly because she was making her:own money.” 6 ~The emergence:of the modern girl symbolized the crisis.m the traditional family, or ze, and the emergence of the smaller nuclear family that Nagy’s survey data also disclosed. Women’s. newly expanded economic roles, writes Silverberg, called into question provisions.of the Mei Civil

Code: and ‘other laws from ‘that era which had’ denied’ women their political and legal: ‘rights because :their place was. within the .Japanese ‘It is interesting that‘a. female symbol came to portray all. the contradictory values that were pulling Japanese society apart in this interwar period.. Fhe modern girl, half Japanese but also vaguely Western, highlighted the message that had first gained: currency in the: Meiji era— namely, that as women go, so go the “traditional family,” Japanese: values, and national unity. ‘The modern girl was an “emblem for.threats to tradition,” Silverberg concludes, “just as the ‘good wife and wise mother’

had stood for:its endurance”? ©: 2 60 be re

‘The tension between the ideal of women’s domestic role and the reality:of their work and life outside the home has been an ongoing theme of Japan’s last hundred years. It exploded under the stram of wartime, when ‘the state again tried to appropriate women and the family as public institutions, part-of the “state apparatus.” Now, however, in order to shore up the old Meiji: family-state ideology of nationalism, government leaders in’ their’ propaganda. and legislation specifically underscored women’s role as mothers. Asa consequence of the state’s- pronatalist policy, women: achieved what some feminists had been calling for since the early ‘Taish6 period: state protection of motherhood, however meager,

legislated in the form of ordinances requiring employers to provide day-care’ facilities. in* plants: with over two hundred’ workers. Miyake (chapter ' 12) argues that the celebration of female fecundity made government leaders reluctant to:draft married women of childbearing age

12 GAIL LEE BERNSTEIN for military service or factory work, despite the urgent need for labor

to replace conscripted males. And the women who were drafted— mainly young, unmarried women—enjoyed none of the protections ex-

tended to women of childbearing age. While mothers were glorified, female workers were exploited. The family again became part of the public sphere, producing, reproducing, fighting, and dying for the state. The ideological insistence that women be not only pillars of the family but also housebound, even in the face of national need, social reality,

and historical experience, is captured in the wartime films reviewed by Hauser (chapter 13). In these films, women “are background figures, holding the family together, supporting their husbands and sons when they are called into the military, and preserving family solidarity when the menfolk go off to war.” The only women in these cinematic depictions who legitimately serve outside the household are single women not needed at home—entertainers, nurses, and prostitutes who volunteer to go to the front or to work in the war industries. The wartime division of labor between single and married women described by Miyake is thus echoed in Hauser’s study. Even the women in postwar films who are cast as critical of the war and of Japanese society remain essentially apolitical homebound domestics absorbed in the preservation of their families. It is as though the female factory workers, office workers, artists, teachers, preachers, entrepreneurs, volunteers, and political activists—all the women who appear on the pages of this book—never really existed, and the moga was nothing but a figment of media imagination. Postwar Japanese society, reviving the gender construct of wartime Japan, recreated woman as mother. This time, however, she was the urban mother of the small conjugal family, removed from farming and factory or office work, separated from her in-laws, and, thanks to the state’s postwar promotion of birth control, freed from excessive childbearing responsibilities. Conforming to the pattern of labor force participation in existence since the Tokugawa period, she worked for pay before marriage and was therefore treated as a temporary worker. After marriage, ideally, she focused entirely on her family’s welfare and especially on her children’s education, though she may have returned to work in an unskilled, part-time position after her children were grown. The postwar Japanese woman thus helped to perpetuate the myth that Japanese women never “worked” and have always been mothers first and foremost. The thirteen essays in this volume, to the contrary, speak to the diversity that has characterized the lives of Japanese women and the discourse on them in the past four centuries. They illustrate how the mean-

INTRODUCTION 13 ing and proper role of woman have changed over time and among classes, differing in such essentials as the importance of biological moth-

ering, the place of the mother in childrearing, the nature of women’s work, the extent to which women should be educated, and the range of their sexual license. Whether women should focus on childrearing, how many children they should have, whether they should receive education

and for what purpose and how much, whether they should or should not work for pay outside the home, whether they should participate in political matters or serve as household heads or run family businesses— these questions have been formally addressed in moral tracts and laws and played out in changing customs among various classes over the course of Japanese history. Numerous participants have shaped this discourse: the state, the scholarly community, the media, society at large, and women themselves. Indeed, Japan may be unique in having waged such a conscious discourse on women for such a long period of time, for since the early days of the Tokugawa rulers the “woman question” has engaged political leaders and the intellectual and moral elite alike.

The issue of how women should behave and what they should and should not do has rarely been left either to chance or to individual choice. If official ideology has been remarkably consistent in defining women

in terms of certain traditional virtues and in assigning them the task of preserving the family, the way women were expected to perform their role, as well as the way they actually did so, has not been immutable. According to Tokugawa teachings, women served the family best by being uneducated, whereas in the Meiji period just the opposite was the case. In Tokugawa times they were expected to contribute mainly as farm laborers and household managers, yet in the Meyi era their place was either in the home, raising good disciplined citizens, or in the factories, supplementing household income and providing cheap labor for Japan’s industrial effort. In wartime Japan they were called on to raise large families to contribute to Japan’s imperialist efforts, while in postwar Japan they were enjoined to raise small families to foster Japan’s economic prosperity. The need to link women and the family to the new nation-state has been a major preoccupation of political leadership in the past century: excluded from politics, women have rarely been excluded from political

considerations or bureaucratic concerns. Since the Mei period both economic imperatives and nationalist ideology have catapulted women, figuratively if not always physically, out of their homes. Urged to serve as “good wives and wise mothers,” as “public-spirited rational homemakers,” and, in recent times, as “education mamas,” Japanese women have also had other demands placed on them, ones going beyond simple pi-

14 GAIL LEE BERNSTEIN ety and devoted ‘nurturing. Organized. into relief organizations, patriotic associations, ‘textile factories, and defense industries, women have been variously valued not.only for their management of the home, the education of their children, and their fecundity, but also for their productivity. ‘The. state: has eulogized them for. their contributions to war relief; to savings, and even to capital. formation. As testimony to their deemed importance, bureaucrats have. studied women’s work conditions, their: health, and their family relations and, with varying, degrees of success, have tried: to draft legislation to. protect. them, as. workers,

mothers, and wives in the service of the state. = = = = = .; This: vigilant. concern with the scope of Japanese womanhood also characterized the pre-Meiji era, when the meticulous definition of fe-

| malelike behavior absorbed the minds of political-authorities and the literati. Far from being invisible or ignored, Japanese women have. cap-

tured the attention of moralists and the state for well over. three

hundred years. With their gender roles publicly prescribed, scrutinized, lauded, or condemned in government edicts, law codes, moral tracts,

. slogans, short stories, theatrical performances, folk tales, family. histories,: magazines, and films, Japanese women have. never been without clear role models. Put another way, they have never been left alone. Still, some women managed to steer courses for themselves. around officially prescribed. or socially sanctioned standards of femalelikeness. Since most of the published material in English on Japanese women has treated the women’s movement, focusing on -what women tried : to change, we have tended to lose sight of what women could already do. In the period between 1600 and 1945, women asserted their autonomy in a variety. of ways: through divorce and remarriage, wage work, business acumen, or artistic talent, and by participation in strikes, the modern suffrage movement, and literary publications that coined or advertised: new slogans for themselves, such as “bluestockings,” “new woman,”

or “modern girl.” But they also achieved a measure of independence and influence in more socially acceptable, traditional ways, for example as matriarchs of successful families. In all these ways, women. participated in the discourse on female gender and helped shape its contours. ~The definition of womanhood is an ongoing process in: Japan. (and

elsewhere in the world). .Demographic statistics in the early 1990’s herald possible new roles .for Japan’s women who, on the average, now marry later (at twenty-six), bear fewer children (1.5), and live longer (to eighty-one): than most.'other women in the world.: How society. and women. themselves. respond to the. consequences. of these changes may

very well “predict,” in the words of Nagy’s concluding quote, “theshape

of Japanese society in. the twenty-first century”. = =

PART ONE

Women and the Family: 1600-1868

BLANK PAGE

ONE

Women and Changes in the Household Division of Labor Kathleen S. Uno

In present-day Japan two domestic activities, motherhood and household management, define the core of women’s familial and social obli-

gations. This model of womanhood, enshrined as a cultural ideal, guides the multitudes of urban women, who now greatly outnumber their country cousins.' Yet only a century ago, among the farmers who I am indebted to Yasuko Ichibangase, Kazuyo Yamamoto, Kuni Nakajima, Hiroko Hara, Kaoru Tachi, Takeo Shishido, Yoshiko Miyake, Masako Ohtomo, Miharu Nishimura, Keiko Katoda, Michiko Mabashi, Keiko Kawau, Kiyoko Tani, Teruko Inoue, Kazuko Tanaka, Mitsue Yoneda, Sachiko Kaneko, Jeff Hanes, Linda Angst, Miriam Silverberg, and Gerry Harcourt for encouragement and assistance during the initial stages of research.

Fellowships from the Japan Foundation and the American Association of University Women funded early research and writing on this topic. Thanks for insightful comments to Gail Lee Bernstein, Christine Gailey, Peter Gran, Matthews Hamabata, Laura Hein, Dorinne Kondo, Barbara Molony, and Stephen Vlastos. 1. In 1980, 68 percent of the Japanese population resided in cities of more than 50,000 inhabitants, with 47.8 percent residing in the three great metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya; Tadashi Fukutake, The Japanese Social Structure (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1982), 100—102. Regarding contemporary urban new middle-class wifehood and motherhood, see Anne Imamura, Urban Japanese Housewtves (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987); Merry White, “The Virtue of Japanese Mothers: Cultural Definitions of Women’s Lives,” Daedalus 116, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 149-63; Suzanne Vogel, “Professional Housewife: The Career of Urban Middle Class Japanese Women,” Japan Interpreter 12, no. 1 (1978): 16-43. Glenda Roberts’s Non-Trivial Pursuits: Japanese Blue Collar Women (forthcoming), pt. 3, suggests that contemporary lower-class women also accept the centrality of household management and mothering in their lives, but that they fulfill their obligations to their families by different means than middle-class women. Some of Roberts’s respondents justified their wage work as a contribution to family life because it contributed to the household economy.

17

18 KATHLEEN S. UNO made up roughly 80 percent of the population, peasant mothers in poor and middling households spent more time at productive than reproductive labor. Although village mothers toiled at domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and child care, they also spent long hours cultivating fields and practicing sidelines such as silk reeling.? If one juxtaposes a portrait of prewar farm women. planting seedlings and carrying rice sheaves with one of postwar housewives tending toddlers, cooking, and shopping, the contrast is striking. Two key questions for modern Japanese women’s history are how this new urban middle-class womanhood emerged as a cultural norm, and how Japanese womanhood came to be defined solely in terms of reproduction—budgeting, buying, housekeeping, and childrearing.

In this chapter, I argue that the emergence of a postwar domestic conception of womanhood is related to early-twentieth-century changes in the household division of labor. In early-modern enterprise households, it was relatively easy for men, women, and children to participate both in productive work such as agriculture, handicrafts, sales, and customer service and in reproductive work such as childrearing, shopping, cooking, and cleaning.? After the Meyi Restoration (1868), state promotion of industrialization:and education encouraged men and school-

children to depart daily from the home to engage in production.and study, respectively. By default, women and-small children remained at home. As employment in workplaces outside the home swelled during the twentieth century, the number of wives specializing in childrearing and housekeeping also increased, although even in 1930 a majority of the labor force still worked in household enterprises.* ‘The emergence . 2. Accounts of the lives of rural women in Robert J. Smith and. Ella Lury Wiswell, The. Women of Suye Mura (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), suggest that this was true during the 1930s as well. The sketches of village women’s lives in Gail Lee Bernstein, Haruko’s World: A Japanese Farm: Woman and Her Community (Stanford: Stanford. University Press, 1983), suggest that this was still the.case during the early. years following World War.

3.. Although I distinguish between these two types of activities, the fact that both took place at home and both were essential to the survival of the household tends to blur the

distinction. | a Co re _ :

4.. Regarding the growth of salaried and factory employment, see Earl Kinmonth, The Self-made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought:.From Samurai to Salary Man (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 278—89;.and Robert E. Cole and Kenichi Tominaga, “Japan’s Changing Occupational Structure and Its. Significance,” in Japanese Industrialization and Its Social Consequences, ed. Hugh Patrick (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 59, 64-65. Information regarding employment. in household enterprises between: 1920 and: 1940 is calculated from data in William W. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan: Growth and Structural Change, 1868-1938 (Prince-

ton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 464-65, 205, 111-12. Even in 1950 and _ 1970, the

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 19 of domesticity as a cultural ideal can be traced to the turn of the century, when a new division of labor arose in the households of public officials,

professors, teachers, journalists, engineers, and white-collar workers, members of an elite who shaped public culture through therr rolés in

policymaking, education, and the media.° _

The starting point for this study ts women’s household activities in the preindustrial Tokugawa period (1600—1868),° which have received less scrutiny than those of the modern (1868—1945) and postwar eras. Previous studies of Tokugawa women, moreover, have largely employed legal and structural approaches to analyze customs and laws regarding marriage and succession. While works on historical demography by Japanese and Western scholars have probed household composition and the proportion of employed persons in “self-employed” and “family worker” categories totaled 59 percent and 35 percent, respectively; see Cole and Tominaga, “apan’s Changing

Occupational Structure,” 76. ,

5. Western-influenced visions of female domesticity appeared in Japan in the 1870s, but’ their implementation in policy and the begmning of widespread dissemination date from the final years of the. mmeteenth century; see Keiko Fujiwara, “Introduction,” in Fukuzawa Yukichi on Japanese Women, ed. and trans. Etichi KiyOka (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1988), vit-xv; Sharon Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Con-

sciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 22-24; Kathleen Uno, “ ‘Good Wives and Wise Mothers’ in Early Twentieth Century Japan,” unpublished paper presented at a joint meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and the Western Association of Women Historians, San Francisco, August 11, 1988, 6-15; Fukaya Masashi, Rydsai kenboshugi no hyoiku, expanded ed. (Nagoya: Reimei Shob6, 1981), 94-153. Translations of articles containing some early Meiji ideas regarding womanhood appear in William Braisted, trans., Metroku Zasshi (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1976). . : . |

6. In English, full-length works containing extensive treatments of pre-World War II

Japanese women include Smith and Wiswell, Women of Suye Mura; Sievers, Flowers in Salt; Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); and Dorothy Robbins-Mowry, The Hidden Sun: Women of Modern. Japan (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983). Shorter but useful discussions can. be found in Joyce Ackroyd, “Women in Feudal Japan,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 3d ser., 7 (1959): 31-68; Marjorie Wall Bingham and Susan Gross, Women in Japan from Ancient Times ‘to the Present (St. Louis Park; Minn,: Glenhurst Publications, 1987); and Joyce Lebra, Joy Paulson, and Elizabeth Powers, eds,, Women in Changing Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976). In Japanese, among many existing works one might mention Takamure Itsue, Joset no rekishi, 3 vols. (KOdansha, 1954-58; reprinted in 2 vols., K6dansha, 1972; and in Takamure Itsue zenshi, vols. 4—5, Rironsha, 1966,.1971); Joseishi sog6 kenkytikai, ed., Nzhon josetshi, 5 vols. (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1982), esp. vols. 3: Kinset and 4: Kindai; Kinsei joseishi kenkyikat, ed., Ronshii kinsei joseishi (Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1986); Seki Tamiko, Edo kéki no joseztacht (Aki Shob6, 1980); and Murakami Nobuhiko, Meij2 joseisht, 4 vols. (Rironsha, 1969—72; reprint K6dansha, 1977). Important source books and reference works include: Fujin mondai shiryé shiisei (Domesu Shuppan, 1977— 78); Mitsui Reiko, Gendaz fujin undéshi nenpyo (Sanichi Shobo, 1974); Joseishi sog6 kenkyakai, ed., Nthon joseishi kenkyii bunken mokuroku (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1983).

20 KATHLEEN S. UNO life course of early-modern villagers and, to a lesser extent, town dwellers,’ only a handful, in English notably those of Thomas C. Smith, have considered the early-modern household division of labor by gender.®

, More recent works by Japanese scholars range beyond household norms and structure, attempting to recreate the lived experiences of Tokugawa women, but much of this newer scholarship is narrow in focus.° In the early 1980s, Wakita Osamu, in the path-breaking series Nihon joseish (Japanese women’s history), called for fresh approaches to the history of early-modern Japanese women.!° In his view, an overriding emphasis on oppression has retarded investigation of the limited but real power and prerogatives of Tokugawa women. Although Wakita did not explicitly problematize gender dichotomies such as public/private,

public/domestic, or productive/reproductive, his treatment of early- : modern female inheritance and political participation implicitly questions such dualisms.!! In 1986, specialists still expressed dissatisfaction with the state of research on early-modern women and sought to move beyond themes of women’s subordination, as this statement suggests: “Among the ordinary people (shomins6) the producers, men and women,

helped one another and worked together. ... They nurtured a mentalité (tshtkt) which differed from that of the samurai class. Yet their image of

woman has not yet fully come to light in research.”!” | 7. In English, see Ackroyd’s fine treatment of women in the medieval and Tokugawa eras, “Women in Feudal Japan.” In Japanese, major works include Takamure, Josei no rekisht, Kawashima Takeyoshi, [deorogi toshite no kazoku seido (Iwanami Shoten, 1957); Otake Hideo, “Ie” to josei no rekishi (KObund6, 1978); Ishii RyOsuke, Nihon sdzoku hé shi (S6bunsha, 1980). See notes 5, 6, 13, and 17, and Cornell’s chapter in this volume (chap. 3). For further references, see Susan Orpett Long, Family Change and the Life Course in Japan, Cornell East Asia Papers no. 44 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, Japan-China Program, 1987), 19-31, esp. 28; and Kathleen Uno, “ ‘Children Are Treasures’: A History of Children in Modern Japan,” in Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective: An International Handbook, ed. Joseph Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), nn. 12, 15, 25, 26~29, 37. 8. Thomas C. Smith, Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a Japanese Village, 1717-1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 79, 91-117, 127-30, 143—56, esp. 95, 144, 152-53; Gail Lee Bernstein, “Did Women Work in Old Japan?”, unpublished paper presented at the East Asian Conference of the American Historical Association annual meeting, San Francisco, December 29, 1983; Miyashita Michiko, “Noson ni okeru kazoku to kon’in,” in Joseishi sogo kenkyakai (ed.), Nihon joseisht 3:31-62, esp. 31-53.

9. In addition to works cited above, see also the titles of women’s history articles in recent Japanese historical and university journals. Specialized works such as these will establish a basis for fresh interpretations of the history of early-modern women. 10. Wakita Osamu, “Bakuhan taisei to josei,” in Joseishi sogo kenkytkai (ed.), Nihon josetsht 3:2.

11. Ibid., 2-14. 12. Kinsei joseishi kenkytkai (ed.), Ronshii kinset joseishi, 2. Subsequent major works such as Wakita Haruko, ed., Bose 0 tou: Rekishiteki hensen, 2 vols. (Jinbun Shoin, 1985); and

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 21 In response to this challenge issued by Japanese scholars, I contend here that analysis of changes in the household division of labor from the early-modern to the modern era offers a useful approach to Japanese women’s history and gender studies. To illuminate this approach, I outline the early-modern household division of labor and suggest how it shifted in the modern era, drawing on a limited amount of evidence concerning the participation of women in production, men in reproduction, and children in both sorts of household activities. ‘This interpretive sketch of the household division of labor is tentative, and is intended to spur further research. I do not dwell on women’s participation in agriculture, for that has been treated elsewhere.!> Rather, I touch on two less explored topics: artisan and merchant women’s work in household enterprises,'* and men’s participation in housework and childrearing.!® A major objective of this chapter is to take issue with the framework for scholarly investigation of the preindustrial household division of labor. Scholars have often employed dichotomies in considering women’s estate.!6 These categories are useful; however, they function ideologically rather than analytically when researchers mechanically relegate women and their activities to a private/domestic/reproductive sphere and men to a public/productive sphere. Such categories can obscure rather than clarify the range of attitudes and behavior open to women.!” Wakita Haruko, Hayashi Reiko, and Nagahara Kazuko, eds., Nihon joseisht (Yoshikawa K6-

bunkan, 1987), have explored the nature of motherhood and women’s diverse experiences from ancient times to the present, rather than focusing on issues of concept, theory, or approach. 13. See notes 2, 33, 34, and 36, and Walthall’s chapter in this volume (chap. 2). 14. See notes 41, 43, and 44. For discussion of women in the modern sake-brewing industry, see Lebra’s chapter in this volume (chap. 6). 15. Additional discussion of men’s role in childrearing appears in Uno, “Day Care and

Family Life in Industrializing Japan, 1868—1926” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, : Berkeley, 1987), 15-60. 16. Examples of works employing such categories are Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology 1n Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County,

New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); Martha Vicinus, A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).

17. Assumptions regarding women’s domesticity muddy otherwise useful discussions of women’s work in households in Jill Kleinberg, “Where Work and Life are Almost One,” in Work and Lifecourse in Japan, ed. David Plath (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 215-47, esp. 226—28; and Miyashita Michiko, “Kinsei ‘ie’ ni okeru boseiz6— noson ni okeru haha no jittai to jokunsho no naka no haha,” in Wakita (ed.), Bosez o tou 2:9—40.

22 KATHLEEN S. UNO Here I attempt to go beyond this standard dichotomous formula to focus on how women performed productive work and men performed reproductive work, in order to gain a wider view of women’s preindustrial household roles and the society enveloping them. A household division of labor approach has several advantages. First, by illuminating the actual conduct of women, it helps to recreate their

lived experiences within the context of the early-modern household. This method complements earlier structural and normative approaches, which lend themselves most easily to the study of elites; because explorations of the household division of labor chronicle daily activities and interactions, they can be applied to the study of rich and poor alike. (To be sure, at present historical evidence concerning the mundane activities of poor women, especially among artisans and merchants, seems sparse, but perhaps this is because our way of phrasing questions has tended to render certain facts invisible to the eyes of the beholder.) Second, study-

ing the household division of labor sheds light on the history of children. Youngsters were not simply household dependents requiring female nurture; rather, as we shall see, they were helpers to their mothers and other household members. In sum, through analysis of the household division of labor, we can gain a fuller view of the lives of women and children, as well as men, and a richer sense of Japanese society as a whole.

WOMEN, MEN, AND CHILDREN IN THE EARLY-MODERN HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR

Four main features of the preindustrial Japanese household, or 7e,!§ exerted a great influence on the family division of labor: its corporate nature, its composition, its structure of authority, and its function as the site of both productive and reproductive processes. These features were designed to maintain household status and wealth, especially among the samurai; however, no one has yet demonstrated conclusively that ze ideals had diffused widely among rural and urban commoners during the 18. In Kinship and Economic Organization in Rural Japan (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), the prominent Japanese anthropologist Chie Nakane asserts that the ze is a corporate group rather than a kinship unit. This view is shared by Jane Bachnik, “Recruitment Strategies for Household Succession: Rethinking Japanese Household Organization,” Man 18 (1983): 160-82; Matthews Hamabata, For Love and Power: Family Business in Tokyo (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Dorinne K. Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press, 1990). While it is true that ze members share affective ties, recruitment to ie membership 1s not restricted to kin. For this reason, in this chapter I refer to the ie as a “household” rather than a “family.” Occasionally I have employed “family” in referring to ie as “house,” as in House of Windsor.

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 23 Tokugawa period. Class differences in household goals, as well as other attitudes and practices, deserve further investigation. !°

The corporate nature of the ze shaped household priorities. Preservation of household property, occupation, name, and status in the local community were vital concerns. The fundamental goal was household continuity, not the well-being of individual members. Adults tried to train young female members, such as brides (yome) and daughters, and male members, including servants, sons, and even the heir, to subordinate their personal hopes for occupation, education, or marriage to 7e needs.”°

Structurally, the Japanese ze resembles a form of stem family: only one child remained in the household with the parents after marriage.”! Generally a son succeeded to the headship, but if a household lacked sons, a daughter’s husband (muko) might be adopted to serve as the next

head.22 When deficiencies of temperament, constitution, or talents made succession by natural offspring unfeasible, households again turned to adoption to secure a new head.?* The successor and his or her spouse in turn produced children (preferably at least one son) to assume responsibility for the household in the next generation. Household size also affected the division of labor. During the late

Tokugawa and Meiji eras, the mean household size in many regions 19. Two works suggest the range of the debate: Fumie Kumagai, “Modernization and the Family in Japan,” Journal of Family History 11 (1986): 375, claims that ze consciousness

did not spread to propertyless rural and urban commoners in the early-modern period; in contrast, Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meyt Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. 19-35, 280—93, suggests that by the 1880s ze values had diffused among peasants.

20. For example, the handsome youth Yutaka married disfigured Tetsu because his father wished to save her household from extinction, but the result was an unhappy match for both parties; see Edwin McClellan, Woman in the Crested Kimono: The Life of Shibue Io and Her Family, Drawn from Mori Ogai’s “Shibue Chisai” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 41-42, 44, 114—15, 133-35. 21. Frequently, but not always, the oldest son remained to succeed to the headship. Variations in succession to headship are described in Nakane, Kinship and Economic Organization, 8-16; Harumi Befu, Japan: An Anthropological Introduction (San Francisco: Chandler, 1971), 41; Akira Hayami, “The Myth of Primogeniture and Impartible Inheritance in Tokugawa Japan,” Journal of Family History 8 (1983): 3-29; and William B. Hauser, “Why So Few? Women Household Heads in Osaka Chénin Families,” Journal of Family History 11 (1986): 343-51. 22. For a glimpse of the diversity of Tokugawa urban family types, see Robert J. Smith, “The Domestic Cycle in Selected Commoner Families in Urban Japan, 1757-1858,” Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 219-35. Here Smith also suggests that Tokugawa Japanese may have prized household continuity but not idealized a specific household form, e.g., the three-generation stem family. 23. Nakane, Kinship and Economic Organization, 4—5. For examples, see McClellan, Woman in the Crested Kimono, 41-44, 89-90, 92, 122, 131; Katsu Kokichi, Musua’s Story, trans. Teruko Craig (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), 12-14.

24 KATHLEEN S. UNO hovered around five persons.?4 When these small households lost a member through death, desertion, or divorce, others had to assume the tasks of the departed. While prosperous households could augment family labor power by hiring servants, members of poor families simply had to exercise greater flexibility and take on additional responsibilities.

Cultural norms designated authority within the household, but the principles of gender and seniority legitimizing authority were somewhat

ambiguous. The househead (koshu), usually a male,?° possessed the greatest nominal authority, though it was tempered by the need for cooperation with other household members to attain the goal of ze continuity.2° The head, like the others, had to engage in various tasks to maintain the household. Moreover, filial piety, which enjoined respect for and obedience to one’s elders regardless of sex, tended to undercut the head’s sole authority. Filial sons, for example, might bow to the wishes of female elders, especially their mothers, even though in principle women submitted to father, husband, and sons (the three obediences). Thus older women, as well as servants of both sexes, who had faithfully and ably labored long years for the household could gain a measure of authority and respect.?” In the absence of an appropriate male, too, a woman could serve as househead. Among women, the spouse of the current head, or housewife (shufu), usually had the most

authority, though her sphere of influence varied among the four classes. At a minimum she had jurisdiction over housekeeping, laundry, provisions, meals, and some social relations. In some regions the symbol 24. Akira Hayami and Nobuko Uchida, “Size of Household in a Japanese County Throughout the Tokugawa Era,” in Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 490; Chie Nakane, “An Interpretation of the Size and Structure of the Household in Japan over Three Centuries,” in ibid., 519-20, 527-28, 531; Robert J. Smith, “Small Families, Small Households, and Residential Instability: Town and City in ‘Pre-Modern’ Japan,” in ibid., 445-55. 25. During the Tokugawa period women served as househeads under certain circumstances, most often during the period a male heir was growing to maturity; see Hauser, “Why So Few?”; and L. L. Cornell, “Retirement, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Con-

flict in Preindustrial Japan,” Journal of Family History 8 (1983): 63. ,

26. These other members included the current househead and housewife and the retired househead and housewife. If the older couple was still househead and housewife, son and young wife (or adopted son and house daughter) made up the second set of adults in the household. 27. An aging househead might step aside in favor of the heir; however, if the retired head and his successor disagreed, faithful conformity to the norm of filial obedience would have decreased the younger man’s autonomy in managing household affairs. One

also finds cases of male househeads deferring to their mother’s directives; see Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, Daughter of a Samurai (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 17: despite her father’s reluctance, Sugimoto received a boy’s education in accord with her grandmother’s wishes.

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 25 of her authority was the rice scoop (shamojt), which she passed to her successor when she retired.?8

From the Tokugawa period into the mid-twentieth century, both productive work, which sustained the ze by producing essential goods and income, and reproductive work (childrearing, cooking, and housekeeping), which maintained ze members, took place at home. The proximity of production and reproduction allowed men, women, and children alike to participate in tasks crucial to the household’s survival. The full significance of this unity of production and reproduction for the division of labor in the small preindustrial Japanese household is not easily comprehended by scholars who assume the physical separation of work and home life. For example, participation in ze economic activities did not preclude helping with cleaning, cooking, or child care. Today the long workday and grueling commute allow salaried male workers scant time to spend with their children, but during the Tokugawa and Meiji periods the workplace of most fathers was near their children. Furthermore, the househead’s obligation to maintain ze continuity gave many men a vital stake in the birth and successful rearing of at least one child.

The unity of production and reproduction also facilitated women’s participation in productive labor. There was, of course, little need for women in wealthy households to labor at the family trade; but without women’s agricultural and handicraft work, the majority of rural households could not survive. In towns and cities it seems likely that women’s

economic participation in merchant and artisan households was more extensive than scholars have previously imagined.”9

Children, too, toiled at productive and reproductive work, in poor households often beginning at age four or five. We have already noted the general need of small households for extra workers; in addition, because the househead successor took up his father’s occupation and girls’ duties as wives resembled their mothers’, parents were encouraged _ to begin children’s vocational training at home at an early age. Thus household children as well as young servants and apprentices worked alongside adults in the preindustrial ze. Although schools of various types flourished during the late Tokugawa period, much of children’s 28. Ueno Chizuko, “The Position of Japanese Women Reconsidered,” Current Anthropology 28 (1987): 575-84, esp. 577—79; Segawa Kiyoko, “Japanese Women in the Last Century,” in Proceedings of the Tokyo Symposium on Women, ed. Merry I. White and Barbara Molony (Tokyo: International Group for the Study of Women, 1978), 1—9. 29. See chapters by Lebra and Robertson in this volume (chaps. 6 and. 4, respectively). For examples of the Meyi era, see Alice Mabel Bacon, Japanese Girls and Women (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 223-24, 232; Akemi Kikumura, Through Harsh Winters: The Life of a Japanese Immigrant Woman (Novato, Calif.: Chandler & Sharp, 1981), 16—17.

26 KATHLEEN S. UNO education, in terms of both vocational training and socialization, took place in the household of either their parents or an employer.*° In sum, early-modern household goals, composition, authority, and activities argue against a rigid pairing of women with reproductive (“inside”) work and men with productive (“outside”) work in preindustrial Japan. Although a division of labor according to seniority and gender existed, women in ordinary households engaged in many forms of productive work and men performed some types of reproductive work. Because the household combined work and residence, performance of the myriad daily tasks of cleaning, consumption, childrearing, and production contributed to the primary goal of household survival. Furthermore, since learning by doing constituted crucial preparation for adult life, in all but the wealthiest households youngsters of both sexes participated in both productive and reproductive household tasks. Women and Productive Work

While the ze household structure permitted the co-residence of several adult women—daughter-in-law (the young wife, or yome), mother-inlaw, unmarried sisters of the head, and female servants?!—existing demographic studies suggest that this residential pattern did not occur in the majority of households.®? Whether yome or shufu, a young married

woman in a poor or average household faced a formidable range of household tasks, as a bearer and rearer of children, as a domestic worker, and as a contributor to the household economy. Although a young wife living with her mother-in-law lacked autonomy in managing 30. Ronald P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), 252-70; Tokiomi Kaigo, Japanese Education: Its Past and Present (Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, 1968), 39-48. It is difficult to calculate Tokugawa school attendance rates owing to regional variation and lack of information regarding the numbers of schools, though clearly private academies and commoners’ schools proliferated during the late Tokugawa. It seems reasonable to conclude that “somewhat under half” of ordinary commoners attended school, with the highest rates in districts close to major cities and “the north and Kydsht falling badly behind”; Ototake Iwazo, Nihon shomin kyoikushi, vol. 3 (1929), 926—28, cited in Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan, 322. See also Walthall’s chapter in this volume (chap. 2).

31. After her mother-in-law retires the yome is referred to as “housewife” (shufu), and after the male heir marries she becomes “mother-in-law” (shitome). 32. The proportion of households with two or more couples for four rural districts in

the first half of the eighteenth century ranged from 19.5 to 30.2 percent; Hayami and Uchida, “Size of Household,” 498, 504; see also Susan B. Hanley, “Family and Fertility in Four Tokugawa Villages,” in Family and Population in East Asia, ed. Susan B. Hanley and Arthur P. Wolf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 207-10. In urban areas, the proportion of elementary families (married couple or couple and children) ranged from 39-42 percent among owners to 53—60 percent among tenants in late Tokugawa Tenndji-

mura; Robert J. Smith, “Transformations of Commoner Households in Tenn6ji-mura, 1757-1858,” in ibid., 255; see also R. J. Smith, “Domestic Cycle,” 222-23.

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 27 household affairs, the assistance of a second adult woman offered her some advantages. Even without a mother-in-law’s coercion, the fact that

a young wife’s own future and that of her children depended on the household’s wealth, property, and status could drive the yome to diligent efforts for the ze. In city and countryside, rich women of all classes largely escaped the physical drudgery of productive and reproductive work; poor women, however, toiled to earn a living and to manage daily tasks. In ordinary farm households, the yome performed productive tasks requiring skill and strength, and did not devote extensive time to childrearing. While the farm wife’s work varied according to locality, it invariably encompassed planting, cultivating, weeding, and harvesting paddies and vegetable fields;3? in economically advanced regions women also cultivated cash crops such as vegetables or tobacco, raised silkworms, spun thread, or wove cloth for market. The peasant wife’s duties included reproductive chores as well: doing laundry, scrubbing pots, sewing garments, and preparing meals. With all these tasks, a woman’s workday lasted from before dawn to after nightfall. Because her productive work was vital to the maintenance and livelihood of the ordinary farm 7e,*4 other house-

hold members—older children or the mother- and father-in-law—

minded infants and toddlers in order to free the yome to engage in strenuous, skilled, or remunerative activities.°> Maids and komor (part-time or live-in nursemaids) assisted wealthy peasant women with domestic

tasks, but even prosperous rural wives apparently were not altogether exempt from farm work.*®

Samurai women were barred from regular stipended posts, although

some held nonhereditary positions as ladies-in-waiting, maids, wet nurses, or governesses in the households of feudal lords. Wives of highranking warriors employed servants, including full-time nannies, to do most of the reproductive work in their households. (By the late Toku33. Bernstein, “Did Women Work?”; Nagashima Atsuko, “Kinsei josei no nogy6 r6d6 ni okeru ichi,” Rekisht hydron, no. 383 (March 1982): 48-65; T. C. Smith, Nakahara, 15253. Also see Walthall’s chapter in this volume (chap. 2). For the early twentieth century, see Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes, 79—101, 233-36.

34. T. C. Smith in Nakahara discusses the work of rural female household members. As women could perform both reproductive and productive tasks, one might surmise that all-female households were less likely to become extinct than all-male households, because women could cook and manage the household as well as engage in economic activities— farming and by-employments. 35. See Uno, “Day Care and Family Life,” 26-29. 36. Even in elite village families women helped with agricultural work, particularly during the spring planting and fall harvest seasons; see Hyman Kublin, Asian Revolutionary: The Life of Sen Katayama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 11-17; Nagashima Atsuko, “Bakumatsu néson josei no k6d6 no jiyé to kaji rdd6,” in Kinsei joseishi kenkytkai (ed.), Ronshti kinset joseishi, 146; Uno, “Day Care and Family Life,” 34—36.

28 KATHLEEN S. UNO gawa period, however, some spouses of impoverished, low-ranking warriors engaged in secondary occupations to supplement the household’s

meager income.)?’ Nonetheless, the better-off samurai wife was not completely idle. She waited on her husband and in-laws, prepared special foods, entertained guests, inventoried household goods, decorated the home, sewed clothing, and managed servants. As a girl she had also

labored at more menial, taxing chores, including sweeping the yard, pruning bushes, cooking, sewing bedding quilts, and weaving mosquito nets.*® Society scorned idleness in women of all ages, save perhaps the wives of nobles, feudal lords, and their top retainers. But even though upper-level samurai women engaged in many household tasks them-

selves rather than leaving reproductive work entirely to servants,®? they were not criticized if they left child care almost completely to their servants.4°

While feudal laws did not bar merchant women from assisting in the household occupation, over time wives seem to have become less active

in the business affairs of the great merchant houses.*! Nonetheless, wives’ careful supervision of many nominally domestic activities, includ-

ing shopping, cooking, sewing, cleaning, entertaining guests, and exchanging gifts, could advance the fortunes of the enterprise. Like up-

per-echelon samurai women, the wives of rich merchants left childrearing and menial household chores to servants,*? whereas wives 37. Otake, “Ie” to josei, 220-23; Torao Haraguchi, Robert K. Sakai, et al., The Status System and Social Organization of Satsuma (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1975), 10—

11, 48-51, 24—25, 63-64; Chikamatsu Monzaemon, “Yosaku of Tamba,” in Major Plays of | Chikamatsu, trans. Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 91-130; Uno, “Day Care and Family Life,” 39-40; Shinmi Kichiji, Kazter zoho kakyti shizoku no kenkyti

(Maruzen, 1965), 312. 38. Sugimoto, Daughter of a Samurai, 21, 23, 46-47, 92-95; Shidzue Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935), 80-86, 134—39.

39. Of course, having young women do housework, cooking, serving, and sewing served a second purpose: without firsthand knowledge of these domestic tasks, mistresses

would have had difficulties properly supervising their servants. The Onna daigaku (Greater learning for women), an advice book for women (see below), prescribed physical labor even for wealthy women: “It is in accordance with the manners of woman to do her manual work though she may have many servants in her employment”; Atsuharu Sakai, “Kaibara-Ekiken [sic] and ‘Onna-Daigaku, ” Cultural Nippon 7, no. 4 (December 1939): 55. Sakai, ibid., 43-56, has translated the Onna daigaku, as has Basil Hall Chamberlain in Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected With Japan (Tokyo: Hakubunsha; London: Kegan, Paul, Trevich, Trebner, 1890), 67—76. 40. McClellan, Woman in the Crested Kimono, 44; Sugimoto, Daughter of a Samurai, 3, 70. 41. Hayashi Reiko, “Choka josei no sonzai keitai,” in Joseishi s6g6 kenkyikai (ed.), Nihon joseishi 3:96—108; Hauser, “Why So Few?” The parallel with the wives of entrepreneurs in early modern France is striking; see Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 42. Uno, “Day Care and Family Life,” 36-38.

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 29 in lesser households did some or all of the domestic tasks themselves. Regardless of who actually performed the work, a woman’s skill in social

relations and in providing food, clothing, fuel, and other daily necessities benefited the business. Savings from frugal consumption could be invested in the enterprise. Thoughtful entertaining maintained clients’ goodwill. Since apprentices lived with their masters, the household atmosphere, including the quality of room, board, and clothing, could affect employee morale as well as productivity and turnover. In smaller enterprises, merchant wives kept books, waited on customers, and took care of personnel matters, such as hiring and employee welfare.*® However, when income fell short, in desperation the wives of the poorest merchants turned to employment outside their own household.*#

_ The scant available evidence concerning the wives of indoor artisans suggests that they assisted in the manufacture and sale of goods. A woman with a baby strapped to her back helping her husband make clay cooking stoves appears in one Tokugawa woodblock print, illustrating a wife’s simultaneous participation in productive and reproductive work in an artisan enterprise. Similarly, a print of a bean-curd maker’s shop showed the wife, also with an infant on her back, assisting in household production.*® Even less is known about the economic role of the wives of rugged outdoor artisans, such as carpenters, sawyers, and plasterers. Although they probably had fewer opportunities to par43. Hayashi, “Choka josei,” 108-24; Charles J. Dunn, Everyday Life in Traditional Japan (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1969), 153; Ihara Saikaku, Some Final Words of Advice, trans. Peter Nosco (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1980), 148—56; Ihara Saikaku, The Japanese Family Storehouse, or the Millionaires’ Gospel Modernised, trans. G. W. Sargent (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 42-43. 44. Ihara Saikaku, Some Final Words, 155—56, 185, 228-29; Ihara Saikaku, This Scheming World, trans. Masanori Takatsuka and David C. Stubbs (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1965), 71, 50, 228. In the modern era, wives received clients at the office, kept the books, handled transactions with subcontractors, and managed the room, board, and welfare of employees; see Mary Lou Maxson, “Women in Family Businesses,” in Lebra, Paulson, and Powers (eds.), Women in Changing Japan, 91-99. Since World War II employees are less likely to reside with their employers, but wives of small entrepreneurs still participate in business affairs; see ibid., 99-105; John C. Pelzel, “Factory Life in Japan and China Today,” in Japan: A Comparative View, ed. Albert Craig (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 393, 399, 401. 45. Indoor artisans (zshokunin) such as smiths, lacquerers, and makers of fans, clogs, umbrellas, and furniture, produced their wares in workshops; outdoor artisans (dejokunin) worked outside in the building trades. 46. Dunn, Everyday Life, 154; Ozawa Hiroshi, “Kinsei no shokunin fazoku,” Rekishi kéron 9, no. 8 (August 1983): 7. Haruko Sumii, “We Switched from Being Drapers to Farmers,” in Widows of Hiroshima: The Life Stories of Nineteen Peasant Wives, ed. Mikio Kanda, trans. Taeko Midorikawa (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 79; and Kleinberg, “Where Work and Life Are Almost One,” 226—28, describe wives’ participation in the drapery and pottery trades of Taisho Japan.

30 KATHLEEN S. UNO ticipate in the household than did the wives of indoor artisans, they still may have kept the accounts or dispensed food, clothing, and emergency assistance to the workers under a labor boss (oyakata).

Ideology sanctioned women’s participation in the economic life of households. Popular moral tracts, such as Kaibara Ekken’s Onna daigaku (Greater learning for women), strongly colored by the neo-Confucianism of the ruling samurai class, emphasized women’s responsibility to the ze, their duty to obey husbands and seniors, and their innate inferi-

ority.*’ Although at first the circulation of these works was limited to educated women of the warrior class, the spread of literacy during the late Tokugawa period undoubtedly increased the influence of didactic tracts among rural and urban commoners, especially among rich farmers and merchants. The pamphlets instructed brides to serve their inlaws faithfully, to practice frugality and modesty, and to learn to manage household and servants well—advice that was on the whole more useful to women of propertied than propertyless households. The lengthy sections on the yome’s duty to husband and in-laws and the supervision of servants contrast sharply with the very brief treatment of mothering, suggesting that the primary duty of a young wife was not child care but obedience to her seniors and training for eventual management of household affairs. Overall, the advice books encouraged women to perform whatever type of work the authorities in her household requested. In fact, some even argued that women’s extensive moral deficiencies made mothers ill suited for contact with impressionable children; thus childrearing assistance by siblings or in-laws in the lower classes and by servants in the upper classes would enable them to concentrate on other types of productive and reproductive work for the household.*8 Men and Reproductive Work: Childrearing

Men’s contribution to childrearing in preindustrial Japanese households __. of all classes is easily overlooked, as it is often assumed that the upbringing of children fell wholly within women’s domain. Yet descriptions of

home life in autobiographies, travelers’ accounts, and fiction attest to , the participation of men in this crucial type of reproductive work. In fact, such activity is entirely consistent with household structure and ideology.*9 47. Sakai, “Kaibara-Ekiken.” 48. Uno, “ ‘Good Wives and Wise Mothers, ” 4—5.

49. For example, one propertyless charcoalmaker took time to catch and carefully roast rabbits, fish, and wild fowl to supplement his young son’s meager diet; see Takai Toshio, Watashi no joké aisht (S6do Bunka, 1980), 8-9. The discussion here focuses on

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 31 Tokugawa fathers apparently played an important role in educating their children, especially their sons. This was particularly true of men in the middle and lower orders of society, those whose trades did not require extensive formal education. Farm, merchant, and artisan fathers could train their own sons or, alternatively, send them out as apprentices to learn a trade; merchants also sent sons (and sometimes daughters) to school ‘to acquire vocational skills, namely writing and arithmetic.5° Warrior fathers, however, were less likely to educate their own sons. The official duties of high-ranking samurai took them away from home for extended periods of time, which prevented them from tutoring their sons in the required Confucian classics and martial arts. As the Tokugawa era progressed, feudal authorities provided instruction at domain academies; thus formal education became increasingly important for the appointment and advancement of samurai sons. At school, the judging of abilities and achievements by critical standards rather than by a father’s fond eye prepared the youths for evaluation by superiors in the domain bureaucracies. Although some fathers attempted to mold their daughters’ character and intellect, in general girls

learned womanly virtues as well as specific vocational and household ,

skills by observing and imitating female models.®! | The role of fathers in the physical care of children is also evident. Responsibility for continuity of the family name, occupation, and status led househeads to want one child to survive to maturity. Furthermore, it behooved the conscientious head to make sure that the heir was carefully groomed to shoulder the household’s social obligations and ply its trade. This concern applied especially to eldest sons, but fathers may

have devoted attention to other children as understudies to the heir.

Clearly, fathers sometimes lavished attention on a noninheriting girl or boy owing to personal qualities such as intelligence, alertness, tractability, diligence, or vocational aptitude.® fathers; Uno, “Day Care and Family Life,” 24-26, 29-32, treats the role of boys and grandfathers in child care. 50. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan, 266—68.

51. Mothers, grandmothers, older sisters, and female servants served as exemplars and teachers. If a girl received formal instruction from a tutor or at a commoner’s school (terakoya), she was quite likely to have a male teacher (although according to Ishikawa Ken, Terakoya [1960], 132, cited in Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan, 257, in Edo (Tokyo) onethird of terakoya teachers were female.

52. Fister’s chapter on Ema Saiko in this volume (chap. 5) provides an early-modern example, and the lives of Takai and Higuchi Ichiyé do so for the prewar era. Although Takai’s father had no property to pass on to his heir, he nonetheless tenderly cared for his son; Takai, Watashi no joko aisht, 8—9. Higuchi’s scholarly father gave her much atten-

tion and a first-rate education despite her mother’s objections, for his son lacked the intelligence and disposition to apply himself to advanced learning; see Robert Danly, ed.

32 KATHLEEN S. UNO There is a fair amount of evidence documenting fathers’ participation in child care during the late Tokugawa and early Meiji. Shikitei Sanba’s Ukiyo buro (Bathhouse of the floating world) offers a glimpse of paternal child care among urban commoners of poor to average means during the late Tokugawa period: “A man in his forties arrived, holding by the hand a boy of five or so and carrying on his back, like a monkey trainer carrying his pet, a little girl of about two, who in turn was clutch-

ing a toy bucket made of bamboo and a ceramic baby turtle.” In the bath, it is obvious that the father, Kinbei, is practiced at undressing his children, cajoling his son into entering the hot water, and washing the two. He even sings songs to distract the boy so that he will not mind the

hot bath. The scene ends with Kinbei telling his children, “Mommy’s | waiting for us, and she'll probably have something nice for you if you’re good.’”°3 Another account describes an impoverished samurai father, ordinarily a ruffan and womanizer, who nursed his gravely ill nine-yearold son day and night for seventy days; during this time he also dashed

buckets of cold water on himself and prayed for his son at a local shrine.**

Isabella Bird’s description of ordinary families encountered in her 1878 travels through northern Japan provides further evidence that fathers’ productive labor and authority did not preclude involvement in child care during the early Meiji period. She found rural men to be very

affectionate with children and noted that fathers as well as mothers

cared for infants: I never saw people take so much delight in their offspring, carrying them

about, or holding hands in walking, watching and entering into their games, supplying them constantly with new toys, taking them to picnics and festivals, never being content to be without them, and treating other people’s children also with a suitable measure of affection and attention. Both fathers and mothers take pride in their children. It is most amusing about six every morning to see twelve or fourteen men sitting on a low wall, each with a child under two years in his arms, fondling and playing with it, and showing off its physique and intelligence. ... At night, after the houses are shut up, looking through the long fringe of rope or rattan which conceals the sliding door, you see the father who wears [nearly] nothing ... in the “bosom of his family,” bending his ugly, kindly face and trans., In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Work of Higuchi Ichiyé, A Meyt Woman of Letters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 11—15. 53. Robert W. Leutner, Shzkitez Sanba and the Comic Tradition in Edo Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 150-53; Ukzyo buro was published between 1809 and 1813, during the Bunka era (1804—18). 54. Katsu, Musui’s Story, 88-90. See Leutner, Shikite: Sanba, 153, for post-Restoration examples. See Higuchi Ichiy6, “Troubled Waters,” in Danly (trans.), In the Shade of Spring Leaves, 228; and Kashima K6ji, Taishé Shitayakko (Seiab6é, 1978), 103-9.

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 33 over a gentle-looking baby, and the mother ... enfolding two children destitute of clothing in her arms. For some reason they prefer boys, but certainly girls are equally petted and loved.

Prosperous urban fathers also devoted time and attention to their children. Although her child had a wet nurse, when Umehara Miki’s husband “returned late at night, the child would wake up and come out to play with both parents.”°* The spontaneity of this father-child relationship is striking. Both the father and mother responded to their offspring’s freely expressed wishes with affectionate indulgence rather than stern discipline. In addition, this merchant father was willing to spend time with his child even after a long day’s activities. Men and Reproductive Work: Housework

It is also possible to reconceptualize male household members’ relation-

ship to a second type of reproductive work: housework. Male householders—househeads, fathers, boys, and grandfathers—engaged in such chores as shopping and housework. Since household needs took priority over individual preferences, men and boys did these tasks if their efforts promised to enhance household prosperity. In 1610, for example, one prudent well-to-do merchant, Shimai Soshitsu, left a set of written injunctions instructing his son to avoid luxury, entertainment, and religion; to stay at home; and to practice frugality in order to guard the family’s riches. Thriftiness included painstaking attention to menial

household tasks: | With your own hands kindle the fire under the stove, for breakfast and dinner, damping the embers afterwards. ... Going out behind the house, collect all the bits and pieces of rubbish: small lengths of rope should be cut up for mixing in cement, ... fragments of wood or broken bamboo, even as small as half an inch, should be stored, cleaned, and used as fuel for watch-fires; ... when buying things for the first time

... go out and buy for yourself. Buy at the cheapest rates, and make careful note of the prices. Afterwards ... you will know whether the articles he [the servant] brings are too expensive or not. ... Housekeep-

ing may be said to be a matter of firewood, charcoal, and oil....No matter what his calling, #f a man does not take these troubles upon himself, he

can never run a household successfully. ... Scrape the bean-paste morning

and night... . [Mix this together with bits of vegetable scraps and] give this to the serving-maids for breakfast and dinner as a side-dish. (emphasis added) 55. Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1880; reprint Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1984), 74. 56. Hayashi, “Choka josei,” 116.

34 KATHLEEN S. UNO No task was too lowly for the househead if its proper completion augmented the well-being of the ze. A man’s solicitude for household consumption, seemingly a part of women’s domain, helped maintain the family fortune by conserving capital. In fact, Shimai seemed not to conceive of the division of labor between husband and wife in rigid terms, writing that “husband and wife should live in lifelong harmony. They should love each other, feeling a common concern for household and business problems and striving together to be thrifty and unremitting in effort.”°’

Likewise, a successful peasant entrepreneur named Suzuki Bokushi (1770-1842) also exhibited great concern for domestic affairs. “Unless everything in his store, in the house, in the dressers, even in the needle cases was in its proper place, he could not relax. No matter how late guests stayed, he insisted that the house be put in order before anyone went to bed. If the cleaning was not done to suit him, he would pick up a broom or dust rag and start sweeping himself. Hating waste, he carefully preserved bits of lumber and bamboo splits.”5° In other words, for a household to prosper, fathers needed to pay attention to management of the hearth, just as mothers had to think about the family enterprise. Children’s Work

Although the wealthy could maintain children as dependents, children of poor and middling farmers and merchants (and probably of artisans as well) helped to sustain the household. Farmers’ children gathered grass, plaited ropes, weeded fields, and picked mulberry leaves; they also gathered firewood for hearth and bath and babysat by carrying in-

, fants on their backs. Households gained income by indenturing children as apprentices or servants in others’ establishments. Young employees, both boys and girls, performed a variety of menial tasks for their employers—cleaning, stoking fires, cooking, minding infants, run57. Ihara, Japanese Family Storehouse, 247-48, 249. 58. Suzuki Bokushi, Snow Country Tales: Life in the Other Japan, trans. Jeffrey Hunter with Rose Lesser (Tokyo: John Weatherhill, 1986), xl. In contrast to patriarchal Confucian ideology, some of the new religions, such as Kurozumiky6, which gained adherents among commoners after the late Tokugawa period, emphasized harmony and cooperation between spouses in its teachings. Kurozumi Munetada (1780-1850), the founder of Kurozumiky6, stressed a “spirit of ‘mutuality and reverence’ ” in marital relations; Helen Hardacre, Kurozumikyo and the New Religions of Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 72. See also Walthall’s chapter in this volume (chap. 2). If their station in life required it, even samurai men engaged in housework, in their own household or another; see The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, trans. Etichi Kiyooka (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 11, 23; and Katsu, Musuz’s Story, 20.

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 35 ning errands, or working some aspect of a craft—depending on their masters’ trade and instructions.°° Parents put children to work not only because the household needed their labor but also to instill good work attitudes in their children from an early age. One Tokugawa peasant offered advice on how to make a child into a good farmer: From the age of 8 boys should gather grass for the animals, pick up horse

dung from the road, make rope, and help with other light work. When they work well, they should be praised and given a coin. When coins accumulate to a sufficient sum, the children should be allowed to buy something they want. Thus their childish hearts will develop the spirit of industry and perseverance. If they are given suitable work in this way when young and taught farming skills as they get older, by age 14 or 15 they will be industrious and meticulous farmers.©

The early training of children through work was not restricted to rural areas, however. In the urban bathhouse tales cited above, a well-to-

do matron of “a refined appearance” informs a friend that she has placed her five-year-old daughter, Onabe, in service with a samurai household. Since a nurse accompanied Onabe to her master’s house, and the cost of the elegant clothes required for her position was “hard on Papa’s wallet,” the mother’s motive was neither to receive income nor

to reduce the number of mouths to feed in the household. Rather, it was for Onabe to learn proper behavior. The mother confided, “If they’re at home, they simply won’t straighten out, no matter how you scold them. But when you send them off to live in a good household,

everything begins to change.’®! Note that this mother believed her young daughter’s education was best left to outsiders of a higher class. POST-RESTORATION CHANGE

After the 1868 Meiji Restoration, new political and economic policies fostered a greater separation of public and private spheres, which impinged on the household division of labor. The separation of school and workplace from the home affected increasing numbers of children, then men, and finally women. Although early policies did not aim specifically to alter the family roles of children and men, by the end of the nineteenth century private educators and government officials deliberately sought to reshape conceptions of womanhood. The cumulative effects 59. Uno, “Day Care and Family Life,” 30-32, 34-37. 60. T. C. Smith, Nakahara, 109.

61. Leutner, Shikite: Sanba, 183-85. |

36 KATHLEEN S. UNO of all these changes slowly became visible by the early decades of the twentieth century, reshaping the daily lives of women, particularly

among the new urban middle class. The new government’s policies had a substantial impact on children’s

place in the household. In 1872 the regime founded a nationwide school system and instituted universal compulsory education as part of its nation-building program. Yet because school attendance disrupted work patterns, many families regarded these policies as unwarranted

interference in household affairs. Not only did schooling transform children from producers into dependents, but the loss of children’s labor at domestic, farm, and shop chores also jeopardized income by reducing productivity, while expenses mounted owing to new expenditures for tuition, educational supplies, and school taxes (these amounted to as much as 10 percent of household income during the early Meiji). Indeed, parents in many localities during the early Meiji resisted compulsory schooling through nonenrollment, truancy, and the burning and razing of elementary schools;® eventually, however, compliance

with the law induced a shift in the domestic division of labor, making more children dependents for a longer time and diminishing their contributions to productive and reproductive activities at their natal or master’s household. In urban areas, attendance figures suggest that most lower-class children under thirteen years of age had largely become dependent students by the mid-Taisho.© To the distress of educators, though, large numbers of rural households were unable to dispense altogether with child labor until after World War II.® Promotion of commerce and industry also impinged on the household division of labor. The destruction of old trades, the expansion of wage labor, and the rise of salaried workers created large-scale organizations—offices, government bureaus, and factories—that split the for-

mer unity of production and reproduction in growing numbers of 62. Michio Nagai, “Westernization and Japanization: The Early Meiji Transformation of Education,” in Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, ed. Donald Shively (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 58. 63. Ibid., 54—55. 64. Children had been dependents in some wealthy families during the Tokugawa era,

but the proportion of dependent children now increased. Furthermore, this form of childhood began to take hold among the urban lower classes during the Taisho era. See also note 65. 65. Former residents and observers of poor urban districts noted that more parents began to enroll children in school over time; see Kashima, Tazshé Shitayakko, 82-84; ‘Tomita Ei, “Hinmin kutsu no sannen,” Kate shihd, no. 604 (March 11, 1920): 4; Katoda Keiko, “Waga kuni ni okeru hinji kyoiku,” Shaka: fukusht, no. 23 (1982): 89. 66. Ushijima Yoshitomo, Néson jid6 no shinri (Iwamatsud6 Shoten, 1946).

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 37 households.®’ As greater numbers of people marched out to work all day at places distant from their homes, wage-earning household mem-

bers—primarily adult males, but also children and some married women—had fewer hours to spend on reproductive work at home.®® Furthermore, because positions at nonfamilial enterprises, especially in technical and managerial positions, could not be passed on to sons, fathers had less incentive to socialize and care for their offspring. For new

middle-class fathers, both proximity to children and motivation to en- | gage in childrearing began to decline by the end of the nineteenth century as new forms of employment and economic organization prolifer-

ated. |

These changes did not immediately influence the attitudes or behav-

ior of the great majority of Japanese women. Although a handful of women boldly assumed new roles in the larger society as teachers and political activists,°° most women labored at productive and reproductive

tasks in the private world of the household as before. Nevertheless, early Meiji policies promoting fukoku kyohe (“rich country, strong army”) and bunmei kaika (“civilization and enlightenment”) did have an indirect

impact on women’s roles, for the departure of men and children from the home for much of the day irreversibly reshaped the daily lives of women in growing numbers of households. As in the case of children, post-Restoration policies affected urban women to a greater extent than rural women, and influenced the lives of middle- and lower-class women in different ways. The salaries earned

| by upper-middle-class males sufficed to support a wife and children as dependents. Children in these families received good educations, both 67. For more on these economic trends, see Nagy’s essay in this volume (chap. 9); and Kinmonth, Self-made Man.

68. Assuming that women constituted a constant 40 percent of industrial operatives (a rather low estimate), one can estimate that male blue- and white-collar workers made up

roughly 13 percent, 20 percent, and 27 percent of the labor force in 1909, 1920, and 1930, respectively, and that a high proportion of these male workers commuted to their workplace. Corresponding estimates of the proportion of female wage-earning operatives in the labor force for those years are 5 percent, 10 percent, and 12 percent; these percentages exclude women working in rural and household enterprises who did not commute to their workplace. Estimates are derived from figures in Tadashi Fukutake, The Japanese Social Structure (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1982), 58; and Lockwood, Economic Development of Japan, 184n.54. Furthermore, few female operatives were married. Regarding Meiji female operatives, see Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 63; Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes, 173—93; Gail Lee Bernstein, “Women in the Silk-reeling Industry in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” in Japan and the World: Essays on Japanese History and Politics in Honour of Ishida Takeshi, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein and Haruhiro Fukui (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 59-63, esp. 62. For the TaishG—early Showa period, see the chapters by Nagy, Molony, and Silverberg in this volume (chaps. 9-11, respectively). 69. Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 26—53, 87-188.

38 KATHLEEN S. UNO as a means of upholding the family status and to enable the sons to enter nonhereditary occupations as government officials or corporate man-

agers and technicians. Since productive work and most education of children over six years of age took place at specialized institutions, wives took charge of the home, performing the unpaid activities of consumption, housework, and care of young children. Thus compulsory educa-

tion and industrialization transformed the upper-middle-class urban woman into a private domestic laborer. These changes affected the home lives of lower-class women differ-

ently. The separation from productive work was less complete for women whose husbands could not support the entire household, and so, to supplement the low, irregular income of unskilled and semiskilled male occupations,” women (and sometimes children) continued to work. Some wives assisted their husbands at petty trades, while others

took in piecework such as assembling straw sandals or matchboxes at home; still others plied trades ranging from street vending to scavenging for salable scraps and dressing hair.’! In any case, neither lowerclass urban women nor women in average and poor rural households could afford to specialize solely in reproductive work. These results of policies implemented to strengthen the nation were unintended; the effort to reshape women’s roles that commenced around

the turn of the nineteenth century, in contrast, was wholly deliberate. Professional educators, including bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education, created a new prescription for Japanese womanhood, rydsaz kenbo (“good wife, wise mother”), in the wake of the 1894—95 Sino-Japanese War.” After 1899, rydsaz kenbo became the cornerstone of women’s education, beginning with a handful of girls’ higher schools and extending to the ordinary coeducational curriculum in 1911. At first glance, rydsaz kenbo may seem to resemble early-modern elite views of womanhood, but in fact it constituted a new view of woman-

hood presented in the guise of tradition. Gone were the old congenital vices that had justified withholding familial and social responsibility from women. Rydsai kenbo presumed a greater degree of female competence; 1f properly educated, mothers could prepare their children to be good subjects of the emperor by instilling in them diligence, loyalty, and patriotism. Mothers thus would render service to the nation from the home. Perhaps the daytime departure of growing numbers of men 70. The lower reaches of prewar Japanese society included petty craftsmen and merchants. 71. Uno, “Day Care and Family Life,” 70-72. 72. See, for example, Nakajima Kuni, “Boseiron no keifu,” Rekishi kéron 5, no. 12 (December 1979), 62-66; Fukaya, Ryésai kenboshugi no kyoitku, 138—72; Uno, “Good Wives and Wise Mothers.”

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 39 necessitated this new appreciation of feminine abilities. Certainly women’s participation in unprecedented activities while their men were away fighting in the Sino-Japanese War contributed to the rising estimates of women’s capabilities.”?

CHANGES IN THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR AND WOMEN’S HISTORY

The study of women in the household division of labor in preindustrial Japan should begin by questioning assumed links among production, reproduction, and gender predicated on conditions of industrial societies. Freed from the two-part assumption that men engaged exclusively

in productive tasks and women labored exclusively at reproductive chores—a distinction more suited to our own than to a preindustrial society—we can better appreciate the toil of 7e members, the relationships between them, and their mentalité. It may prove equally profitable

to question the equation of women with the domestic realm and men with the public realm. Women did face political and economic restrictions in their attempts to venture outside the home, but if one assumes that women had no role outside the household, almost inevitably female participation in public activity will be overlooked.”4

This chapter has suggested the utility of the household. division of labor in the study of women’s history. By investigating the role of men

in childrearing and household management in preindustrial households, we may better understand how women’s (and men’s) roles changed as new social organizations—government bureaus, factories, and corporations—proliferated in the decades following the Meiji Restoration. An awareness of the changing patterns in children’s activities can illuminate women’s history as well. By starting with the preindustrial role of children as productive and reproductive workers, we can see the impact of modern education on women’s place in the household division of labor. A household division of labor approach has implications for the study 73. Regarding women’s production for the nation, see the essay by Nolte and Hastings in this volume (chap. 5); Miyake’s chapter in this volume discusses the evolution of motherhood in the 1930s and 1940s as Japan mobilized for war (chap. 12). 74. For example, Nagashima, “Bakumatsu n6son josei,” 167, points out that the grand-

mother in the wealthy, influential Sekiguchi house personally delivered gifts from the household and that the young wife, not the male househead, negotiated her daughter’s service contract with a prosperous family in Edo. These peasant women traveled out of their village overnight to represent their household in the great capital. [shimoto, Facing Two Ways, 138-39, discusses the role of wealthy urban women as representatives of their households in giving and receiving gifts and attending funerals and memorial services. See also Wakita Osamu in Joseishi sogo kenkyiikai (ed.), Nihon joseisht 3:11—14.

40 KATHLEEN S. UNO of gender and manhood as well. It leads to questions regarding noninheriting adult male household members who were not househeads, for instance, for the early-modern househead controlled not only their subsistence and livelihood, but their political and sexual life (at least the

right to marry) as well. One might ask what, if any, were the similarities | in the situations of economically, socially, and politically subordinate men and women, and whether reconsideration of relationships between gender, status, dependence, and hierarchy in early-modern Japan is

called for. The evidence presented here regarding changes in women’s work in

households from the Tokugawa period to the late Meiji suggests that the origins of the intensive style of mothering characteristic of the postwar urban middle class can be traced to the early twentieth century. It also suggests that Japanese conceptions of womanhood as motherhood and of childhood as a lengthy period of economic dependence are social constructs that emerged in modern times. Moreover, the evidence presented concerning the division of reproductive labor in Tokugawa and early Meiji households implies that to view mothering as woman’s universal and natural destiny is to deny history.

Joan Kelly has argued that the histories of men and women sometimes diverge and that progress for men does not always constitute progress for women.” The changes in the family division of labor and in women’s roles that occurred during the formation of the Japanese industrial nation-state may further exemplify the divergence of the histories of the two genders. When workplace and home were one, women

labored at a variety of productive and reproductive tasks; with the emergence of new specialized institutions that removed men and children from the home for long hours each day, women alone remained bound to the home in middle-class twentieth-century Japan. The situation of lower-class women was also in flux, and their energy was taxed more than ever in their efforts to obtain adequate incomes and to maintain a decent home life. The new order offered women unprecedented educational and vo-

cational opportunities. But did these opportunities offset new constraints in the household division of labor and the state’s attempt to redefine women as ryésaz kenbo? At first glance, only the gains stand out. Compulsory education was required for girls as well as boys, and con-

ceptions of female inferiority lessened as mothers were accorded greater responsibility for childrearing. Yet closer scrutiny reveals that, by 1900, women had been barred from politics, virtually stripped of property rights and the right to serve as family heads, and nearly ex75. Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19-51.

THE HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR 41 cluded from universities, the gateways to leading corporate and bureaucratic positions.’”© The emerging division of labor assigned work in the household strictly to women; the new legal system made their access to commanding positions outside the home more difficult. Of course, it is fair to ask to what extent men profited from the new division of labor. Perhaps the greater rigidity in family roles engendered by the separa-

tion of workplace and home in the modern age has been disadvantageous to men (and perhaps children) as well. After all, if Japanese women became trapped in the home, Japanese men became locked out of the home. 76. Murakami, Meiji joseisht, vols. 2 and 3.

TWO

The Life Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan Anne Walthall Among the peasantry of Japan one finds the women who have the most freedom and independence. ... The Japanese peasant woman, when she marries, works side by side with her husband, finds life full of interest outside of the simple household work, and as she grows older, her face shows more individuality, more pleasure in life, less suffering and disappointment, than that of her wealthier and less hard-working sister. ALICE MABEL BACON!

Peasant women in Tokugawa Japan grew up, married, gave birth, and died in generally obscure circumstances. Little is known of them as individuals, and the emotional content of their lives remains

largely unrecorded. The accounts women themselves left molder in family archives, and aggregate data can scarcely provide insights into the nature of their childhood experiences, their relations with their husbands and their husband’s family, and their later years. It is only by piecing together a variety of different sources that we can begin to perceive, in patchwork, a pattern to these women’s lives.

One source is village records, such as the population registers (shiimon aratamechd), petitions, passports (mura-okuri tssatsu), promis-

sory notes for brides, and deeds of inheritance, which, although their main purpose was to promote social stability, tell us something about women’s experiences. In addition, agricultural handbooks describe

the kinds of work women performed, and precepts for women tell us what they were expected to do. Early-nineteenth-century family histories and diaries kept by wealthy peasant entrepreneurs are a 1. Alice Mabel Bacon, Japanese Girls and Women (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891; re- | print 1902), 218.

42

THE LIFE CYCLE OF FARM WOMEN 43 third, more vivid source for the historian interested in exploring the fabric of Japanese women’s lives. Those kept by Suzuki Bokushi

from the snow country of Echigo, by the Sekiguchi family from Namamugi village near Yokohama, and by Suzuki Heikuro from a village in the Tama region that is now part of greater Tokyo are particularly rich sources, and I have used them extensively for this chapter. The major conclusion we can draw from these materials is that social relationships between the sexes varied much more than historians have previously thought possible. Opportunities for women, like those for men, were largely a function of economic class and social status: the lives of impoverished peasant women bore little resemblance to those of their wealthy farm neighbors, and a rich peasant’s wife, sister, or daughter experienced a much more agreeable existence than many a male from a poor peasant family. The picture is further complicated by regional differences that pro-

duced a variety of social arrangements. In some regions but not in others, for example, women might serve as household heads, even though the designated roles for women presumably required that daughters obey their fathers, wives their husbands, and mothers their

sons. Historians trying to make sense of this diversity might well be tempted to agree with one major figure in the preparation of the late-nineteenth-century Meiji Civil Code, who suggested that the customs of farmers were not really customs at all.? Put another way, it 1s impossible to establish a single portrait of rural women. The view that emerges from available sources suggests that, like all people who shape their lives around the rhythms of agricultural cycle, Japanese peasants were accustomed to responding flexibly to the vagaries of their existence. They had to deal with what David W. Plath had defined as the life-course problem—that is, “how to adapt one’s personal trajectory and tempo of biographical events” to the preindustrial order. Deciding when and whom to marry, for example, was not simply a function of tradition but necessitated real choices on the part of the woman and

her family. Although every woman was a daughter, and almost all became wives, not all became mothers. For the women involved, each stage in their lives thus became increasingly problematical, and for his-

torians today each step opens up more opportunities for debate and controversy: indeed, was there a typical or “normal” pattern of existence? 2. Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Mey Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 182. 3. David W. Plath, Work and Lifecourse in Japan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 4,17.

44 ANNE WALTHALL DAUGHTERS

Parents appear to have made few distinctions between boys and girls in

infancy. Soon after birth both sexes observed the rites of passage through which they became members of their communities. Parents marking the arrival of a child had a variety of ceremonies from which to choose. Those that they deemed important seem to have varied more according to their economic standing, the time period, the region, and the life course of the other family members than to the sex of the newborn child. In the case of wealthy families, the ceremonies marking the birth of a child of either sex were often elaborate. Thus, two weeks after Fute

was born in 1783 to the Nomura family from Hitachi province, her grandparents held a banquet for 120 people to celebrate her birth.* Toannounce the birth of Ai in 1835, the Sekiguchi family from Namamugi waited only seven days but also celebrated rather lavishly, sending trays containing sake, pickles, radishes, mushrooms, and fish to everyone in the neighborhood. A month later they took their newborn daughter to the family shrine, paid a fee of two hundred mon, and distributed balls"

of red beans and rice to the neighbors. The poor could hardly afford such elaborate celebrations for any of their children. Gender distinctions became more apparent in naming customs, gift giving, and ritual observances as infants grew into young children. Names distinguished girls from boys soon after they were born: while Ai’s brothers were given names derived from ancient military terms, the

character Az means “beloved.” Her first bath was not an important event, whereas her older brother’s was. At Ai’s first New Year, thirtythree neighbors and five relatives sent money, and her maternal grand-

parents sent her a doll; her parents reciprocated with rice cakes and held a banquet for family members. More people attended her brother’s first New Year, however, and fancier presents were sent to the neighbors. At their third birthday, most girls were allowed to receive a new hairdo; Ai’s was ignored because it conflicted with her brother’s fifth birthday. For her seventh birthday, which marked her formal introduction into her peer group, she donned the Japanese woman’s wide sash

(obi), and her family held a party for children in the neighborhood, giving them all balls of red beans and rice. Yet these festive foods were presented to the neighbors at all of her brother’s birthdays, and his fifth birthday was marked with an elaborate celebration with his peers.® 4. Ibaraki kenshi hensan kinseishi dainibukai, Ibaraki-ken shiryé: Kinset shakat keizat hen,

vol. 1 (Mito-shi: Ibaraki-ken, 1971), 198. |

5. In Namamugi, celebrations for the boy’s fifth and the girl’s seventh birthday centered on parties, while in Edo the child would be dressed in bright clothing and taken first

THE LIFE CYCLE OF FARM WOMEN 45 Although boys may have received more attention at the major milestones of their early childhood, the upbringing oi both sexes in their early years, as far as we can tell, was otherwise fairly equal. The way parents indulged infant boys and girls worried educators. According to Yamana Bunsei, a peasant from Ki province, “husband and wife raise the child. During the day it receives its father’s caresses and affection, at night it enjoys its mother’s milk.” Like most writers on the subject of childrearing, Yamana saw no need to differentiate between young boys and girls. But parents had to be careful. Precepts still in the possession

of the Matsushita family in the Ina valley warned, “If the parents indulge in their love for their children and allow them to grow up as they please without discipline, when the children reach adulthood they will hate to work, they will delight only in evil things, . . . they will run away,

and they will end their lives as outlaws.’ Believing that children are innately good but have to be molded by their environment into social beings, other writers stressed the importance of observational learning and good role models. Although the evidence is inconclusive, it appears that the first five years of any child’s life were made as pleasant as family circumstances permitted. When the child showed sufficient maturity, he

or she was assigned age- and gender-appropriate tasks and treated more strictly.®

A host of factors—geographical location, economic opportunity, and

historical change—made a difference in how a girl became a young woman. Yet girls everywhere were expected to be obedient and gentle,

discreet in speech, clean and tidy, and industrious in women’s tasks. Their education in practical skills was acquired in needle shops (ohartya) and girls’ rooms (musume yado), which paralleled young men’s associa-

tions and like them were established village by village. Attendance was compulsory (though perhaps not for the rich and prestigious) from age fourteen to marriage, and in some regions a girl was not considered a respectable, marriageable adult until she had been a member for several years. During the day she would help with the work at home, but at night she would go to the musume yado, where she would learn handicrafts, talk with other girls and the older women to visit a shrine and then to neighbors and relatives; see Hisaki Yukio and Mita Sayuri, “Jakydseiki zenpan Edo kinko néson ni okeru joshi kydiku no ichi kenkya,” Yokohama kokuritsu daigaku kydtku kiyd, no. 21 (November 1981): 72—77.

6. Yamana Bunseli, “Nodkakun,” in Kosodate no sho, ed. Yamazumi Masami and Nakae Kazue, vol. 2 (Heibonsha, 1976), 205. 7. Oshika sonshi hensan iinkai, Oshika sonshi, vol. 1 (Nagano-ken, Oshika-mura: Oshika Sonshi Kankokai, 1984), 778.

8. Kojima Hideo, “Japanese Concepts of Child Development from the Mid-seventeenth to the Mid-nineteenth Century,” International Journal of Behavioral Development, 9, no. 3 (September 1986): 315-29.

46 ANNE WALTHALL who supervised work and play, and perhaps sleep, although some historians have argued that the chief purpose was to provide a place for common study. Needle shops, which were open only during the winter, likewise concentrated on the skills required for everyday life.

A farm wife skilled at sewing and other crafts became the “little mother” to her students, teaching them sewing and perhaps flower arranging, tea ceremony, gift wrapping, and music.° In the girls’ rooms

and needle shops, poorer farm women learned from other women, an opportunity unavailable to women from wealthier farm households who were discouraged from mingling promiscuously with ordinary peasants.

In some areas of Japan by the early nineteenth century, families might invest enough money in their daughters’ educations to allow them to attend temple schools, or terakoya. Although Ronald P. Dore estimated that about 43 percent of all boys and 10 percent of all girls attended school, there was considerable regional variation: the impoverished Tohoku region educated far fewer children of either sex than the more flourishing areas around Edo and Kyoto.'® It is difficult to determine how many girls had schooling; one rural school near Okayama, for example, as encouragement to female students, kept no records of their attendance, since the teachers assumed that girls would be embarrassed to have their names called in public.!! Nevertheless, we can

assume that most girls who attended school came from middle-level peasant families and above because schooling was expensive: costs included lunch, clothing, shoes, and rainwear, in addition to the loss of a valuable labor source. Girls studied for two to five years—not enough time to learn diffi-

cult Chinese characters, even had they been thought capable of it, _ but long enough to absorb moral instruction. Popular texts, like Jokun

(Precepts for women), were based on Chinese classics that taught the virtue of obedience. Transposed into the Japanese syllabary and supplemented with biographies of exemplary women, these texts provided practice in reading and writing that enforced the code of behavior 9. Higuchi Kiyoshi, Nippon josetshi hakkutsu (Fujin Gahosha, 1979), 220; Shiga Tadashi, Nihon joshi kydikushi (Tamagawa Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1960), 276-81; Hiratsuka Ekitoku, Nthon kyéikusht (Kyoiku Kaihatsu Kenkydjo, 1985), 134-35. 10. Ronald P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), 321; Herbert Passin, Society and Education in Japan (Tokyo:

Kodansha International, 1965), 44-46. | 11. Shibata Hajime, Kinsei goné no gakumon to shisé (Shinseisha, 1966), 200-201. See also Shibata Hajime, “Nomin ishiki to ndson bunka no dent6,” in Chihé bunka no denté to sdz6, ed. Chihéshi kenkyi kydgikai (Yazankaku, 1976), 191—92. This school was established by the poor peasants (komae byakusho) in 1782 to improve public morals through study by men and women alike.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF FARM WOMEN 47 thought appropriate for women by their authors, male members of the ruling class.!* Miscellaneous Lessons on Filial Piety, a textbook written

by Sekiguchi Toemon, a wealthy rural entrepreneur from Namamugi, admonished girls to “do their housework, look after their in-laws and their husbands, and teach their children accounting, reading, etiquette, and handwriting.”!® Toemon taught whoever was willing to come to his house, including the daughters of his tenants. In the early Meiji period, such informal opportunities for schooling disappeared, and the public institutions that replaced them may well have made education less available to the daughters of the poor. In villages where the male elite was uninterested in improving public morals, poor women remained illiterate. Wealthy families, however, devoted a surprising amount of income and energy to the upbringing of their daughters. The Suzuki family from Echigo demanded much more than the simple skills learned by ordinary peasants. Taka, born in 1777, went to a temple school to learn penmanship at age eight and, together with her niece Shin, then studied the Chinese classics, selections of Chinese poetry, and correspondence. Her sister Fuji, like some other wealthy rural women, became an accom-

plished poet, leaving over a thousand poems at her death. But it was her brother Bokushi’s granddaughter, Suwa, who seems to have been the most diligently schooled. Suzuki Bokushi served as his granddaughter’s private tutor, teaching her everything he taught his son. She began to read and write by the age of seven, and she was already helping to record transactions in the family pawnshop when she was ten years old. By his own account, Bokushi believed in teaching his children to value practical learning, especially the techniques of accounting,

and not to waste their time studying the classics. In the case of his granddaughter, however, he gave instruction in painting and poetry writing as well. From a young age, Suwa was also expected to perform certain public roles, representing the family at important ceremonial occasions. At twelve she and her cousin T’sune spent several days kneeling while a priest read from esoteric Pure Land texts. At sixteen she repre-

sented her family at the funeral of her great-grandfather in a nearby village. !* 12. Shiga, Nihon joshi kydikusht, 282-88. In Tochigi prefecture, Usui Sei had 120 to 130

students, both boys and girls. She taught the boys reading and the girls reading, sewing, and painting. 13. Nagashima Atsuko, “Bakumatsu n6dson josei no k6d6 no jiya to kaji r6d6,” in Ronshi kinsei joseishit, ed. Kinsei joseishi kenkyaikai (Yoshikawa Kébunkan, 1986), 149.

14. Suzuki Bokusht no shiryé shi (Niigata: Niigata-ken Kyoiku Iinkai, 1961), 7, 26, 46, 207. Bokushi is famous for his ethnographic description of life in the snow country, orig-

48 ANNE WALTHALL In the villages near Edo, wealthy peasant entrepreneurs bent on acquiring the best and most expensive education available for their daughters had them become servants in the homes of daimy6 and hatamoto (high-ranking retainers in the shogun). Here, at no small cost to their families, they learned feminine deportment: good posture and graceful movement, elegant and deferential language, appropriate dress and bodily care, and techniques of managing a household. They might even move from one post to another to learn different

forms of etiquette. Although the girls received nominal wages, their parents had to provide all of their daily necessities, bedding, pillows, mirrors, shoes, pocket money, and clothing—three changes a year— as well as presents and fees for the go-betweens and the employers. In 1812, the Sekiguchi family had three daughters in service. The average cost per daughter was about 5 to 6 percent of the family’s household budget, not including emergency expenses, preparations made before the girls went into service, or presents upon entering and leaving a household.'> According to a guide to service in samurai households, the costs were evidently worth it, for “if a girl remains with her

parents she will never know how to deal with misery. If she has not suffered, she will not make a good bride, so girls apprentice themselves to learn self-discipline.”'® Today the pampered daughters of the upper middle class still go to finishing schools—the most prestigious women’s colleges.

For the daughters of wealthy peasants who lived too far from samurai

households and the educational opportunities they offered, costly pilgrimages functioned more or less as finishing schools. The pilgrimage both strengthened faith and provided an occasion for sightseeing and observation; it was a learning experience that took young women outside their home communities and forced them to interact with strangers. Taken usually a year or so before marriage, the pilgrimage made it possible for teen-agers to travel with their friends and female relations largely apart from male society, except for one companion-escort. Suzuki Toyo, mother of Taka and Fuji, never forgot her pilgrimage to the Ise shrine in 1752 when she was fourteen, and even at seventy she could

recite the names of every inn she stayed at en route. All of her daughinally published in 1835; see Suzuki Bokushi, Snow Coun’. Tales: Life in the Other Japan, trans. Jeffrey Hunter with Rose Lesser (Tokyo: John Weatherhill, 1986). 15. The Sekiguchi family spent much less than Shibue Io’s father, who paid four hundred ryé a year to keep her in service at the T6d6 mansion; see Edwin McClellan, Woman in the Crested Kimono: The Life of Shibue Io and Her Family, Drawn From Mori Ogav’s “Shibue

Chisat” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 23. 16. Hisaki and Mita, “Edo kink6 noson ni okeru joshi kydiku,” 83—85, 90. See also Kawano Junichiré, “Koshi nikki ni miru bakumatsu-ki nanushi no tsuma,” Tama no ayumi, no. 27 (November, 1984), p. 21.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF FARM WOMEN 49 ters made the pilgrimage to Ise, at a cost of five to ten ryé apiece, paid by their family.!”

Of course, not everyone could afford a pilgrimage. Helen Hardacre has argued that “by the end of the [Tokugawa] era, there was a popular explicit understanding that all persons, male or female, had a patriotic duty to make the pilgrimage [to Ise] at least once. In fact, the pilgrimage became associated with coming of age rites

and acquired an air of custom and duty rather than individual faith.”!® Nevertheless, Shinjo Tsunezo has noted that long-distance

pilgrimages were an option only for wealthy women, not for the poor. Even the so-called escape pilgrimages (nuke-mairi) were never

so prevalent as to allow every Japanese the opportunity to pray at Ise."9

By the early nineteenth century, wealthy peasant families believed it

necessary to make truly remarkable investments in their daughters’ schooling. Girls learned more than their mothers had, and they learned it from strangers at enormous expense. Why did peasant families invest so much time and money in training female members who would leave upon marriage? Was it simply to increase their value in the marriage market? Was it to add luster to the family’s reputation? Or did bonds of affection lead parents and grandparents to spend money on what would rationally seem to be a poor economic investment? While the reasons differed according to family circumstances, there is no doubt that wealthy peasants enhanced their family’s reputation by investing in their daughters. A well-dressed, well-traveled, well-educated, and well-mannered girl was a family asset. Perhaps for this rea-

son, even ordinary peasants indulged their daughters whenever they could. In fact, in 1841 Sata, daughter of Sajiemon from the Tsukui district in Sagami, was arrested for wearing clothes above her station.?° The poor usually could not afford to lavish resources on daughters, however. When girls from ordinary peasant and tenant farm families 17. Suzuki Bokushi no shiry6 shi, 12-13, 199. 18. Helen Hardacre, Kurozumikyé and the New Religions of Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 40. 19. Shinjd Tsunezo, Shaji sanshi no shakai keizai shiteki kenkyi (Hanawa Shobo, 1964), 988—89; ShinjO Tsunezo, Shaji to kétsu (Shibundo, 1960), 158. The nuke mairi was a pil-

grimage taken without permission of one’s parents or other people in positions of authority.

"20. Sata was wearing a crepe-lined under-kimono, the collar of which had large dapples, a handwoven wadded silk over-kimono, a jeweled pongee silk jacket with an undercollar of black satin, and a handwoven satin obi faced with crepe. She carried a small crepe wrapper for holding tissue paper and in her hair were two ornamental hairpins, one silver and one Korean; see Kanagawa-ken kikaku chésabu kenshi henshishitsu, Kanagawa kenshi shiryéhen 7: Kinsei, vol. 4 (Yokohama: Zaidan Hojin Kanagawa-ken KOsaikai, 1975), 780.

50 ANNE WALTHALL began to leave their homes and villages in the latter half of the Tokugawa period, they went to work as indentured servants (hdkdnin). Studies of polder villages in central Japan show that three-fourths of the daugh-

ters of tenants in one village left home in search of work, and nearly two-thirds from another were sent into service outside the village at least once in their lifetimes.?!

Sending a young unmarried girl out to work for the sake of the rest of the family could have dire consequences. Parents worried that their daughter might be mistreated or sold into prostitution. Worse yet, once freed from her parents’ supervision she might run away to the city, causing them embarrassment and financial hardship.?2 Many girls left their families at the age of twelve to serve strangers, receiving as payment two changes of clothing and yearly salaries remitted to their fathers in amounts ranging from one to two and a half ryo—half the cost or less of a pilgrimage to Ise. Children even younger could often find work as nursemaids.?° Factors such as the spread of indentured servitude (which took girls out of the village), the growing emphasis on education, and the opportunity to go on pilgrimages conceivably influenced sexual practices pre-

ceding marriage, the choice of marriage partner, and the age of marriage, perhaps reducing the community’s ability to control its women through the old custom of yobai (night visits). Here, too, the evidence frequently is contradictory or varies according to a family’s socioeconomic standing. There is also a discrepancy between official samurai ideology and actual peasant behavior. Official samurai teachings frowned on premarital sexual promiscuity.

The “Instructions for Women” sent to peasant villages by the lord of Matsumoto in 1793 announced that “after a girl is ten, she should not 21. Hayami Akira, “The Myth of Primogeniture and Impartible Inheritance in Tokugawa Japan,” Journal of Family History 8, no. 1 (1983): 9-11; Saito Osamu, “Population and the Peasant Family Economy in Proto-Industrial Japan,” ibid., 41. 22. In 1808 the peasant Magohachi, from a village near Hachidji, sued to have his daughter returned to him. He claimed to have been assured by middlemen that she was working as a maid for the lord of Owari. Only when he fell ill and wanted to see her did he discover that she had been sold to a brothel in Shin Yoshiwara. See Osada Kanako, “Kinsei ndson josei no ichidanmen,” Tama no ayumi, no. 27 (November 1984): 33. Examples of women who ran away without fulfilling their contracts may be found in Oguchi Yuyird, “Gejo hok6 to nésagy6é: koshi nikki yori mita,” ibid., 11; and Sakurai Masanobu, ed., Shin Nihon joseishi (YGhG6 Shoten, 1979), 255-56. In 1859, destitute parents from a village near Osaka agreed to sell their daughter Hisa, then eighteen, for seventy ryé (formally called an adoption) and promised not to object to anything her new family might require of her; see Dan Fenno Henderson, Village “Contracts” in Tokugawa Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 149-59. 23. Osada Kanako, “Onna no kurashi,” in Edo to chihé bunka, ed. Kimura Motol, vol. 2 (Bun’ichi S6g6 Shuppan, 1978), 126; Shiga, Nihon joshi kydtkushi, 281.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF FARM WOMEN A1 mix with boys. After she is twelve or thirteen, she should not come near men. It is best to be modest and discreet.”2* Yet evidence gathered by

folklorists and historians, while sketchy and not altogether in agreement, suggests that peasants generally ignored these precepts.”° Several historians believe that premarital sex among village girls and boys was common. In Louis Frederic’s words, “Boys and girls could have amorous intrigues as it suited them and these did not necessarily lead to marriage.”?° Meiji ethnographer Yanagita Kunio further argued that the young men’s associations of each village, and not parents, actually controlled the selection of marriage partners by means of night visits. ‘The boys would spend evenings with members of the girls’ groups, working,

singing, and chatting before pairing off and sleeping together. They would then tell their parents whom they had chosen as a marriage partner.?’

Evidence from other areas, however, suggests that sexual relations were permitted only after the couple became engaged. In the mountains of Shikoku, young men visited girls in villages as far distant as twenty to thirty kilometers, where they helped in paper making and tried to ingratiate themselves with the girls’ families, but they were watched so closely that they seldom managed to become intimate. In other areas, both boys and girls were criticized only if they had sex with more than one partner.”® 24. Oshika sonshi 1:779. 25. Robert J. Smith and Ella Lury Wiswell, The Women of Suye Mura (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 26. Louis Frederic, Daily Life in Japan at the Time of the Samurai, 1185-1603 (New York:

Praeger, 1972), 58. Richard Varner, “The Organized Peasant: The Wakamonogumi in the Edo Period,” Monumenta Nipponica 32, no. 4 (1978): 480, asserts that a man had to have many short-term sexual encounters before he could think of marriage. ‘Thomas Elsa Jones

found that in Namase in Ibaraki prefecture not more than 2 percent of the unmarried young women were virgins, and all married women had had sexual relations before marriage; quoted in Robert J. Smith, “Making Village Women into ‘Good Wives and Wise Mothers’ in Prewar Japan,” Journal of Family History 8, no. 3 (1983): 74. In the villages of Higashi Matsuyama in Saitama prefecture, the sons and daughters of ordinary peasants

were comparatively free in their sexual experiences, and for them marriage had the meaning of settling down; see Shishi Hensanka, Higashi Matsuyama—shi no rekishi, vol. 2 (Saitama-ken, Higashi Matsuyama-—shi: Higashi Matsuyama—shi, 1985), 366. 27. Hirayama Kazuhiko, “Seinendan to sonraku bunka,” in Chihé bunka no denté to s0z6, ed. Chihdshi kenkya kydgikai (Yazankaku, 1976), 246—49. That this view is still prevalent

may be seen in an article by Ueno Chizuko, “Genesis of the Urban Housewife,” Japan Quarterly 34, no. 2 (April-June 1987): 133. It has been said that in some villages, these night visits were made to widows or women whose husbands were away from home. 28. Hirayama, “Seinendan to sonraku bunka,” 247; Ikegawa choshi hensh@ tinkai, [kegawa choshi (Kochi-ken, Agawa-gun, Ikegawa-cho: Ikegawa-ch6 Ky6éiku Iinkai, 1973), 590-91; Oshika sonshi hensan iinkai, Oshika sonshi, vol. 3 (Nagano-ken, Oshika-mura: Oshika Sonshi Kankokai, 1984), 309-12.

D2 ANNE WALTHALL Diverse courtship practices make it difficult to determine in specific cases the exact age of marriage. In areas where night visits were custom-

ary, the line between the role of daughter and the role of wife became blurred. This is also true in cases where married daughters of the poor continued to work for their natal families until their mid to late twenties

or even older before moving to their husband’s home. In some instances, marriages were not officially registered until after a trial period of a year had elapsed. For all these reasons, one cannot say with certainty what the average age of marriage was for couples in preindustrial Japan. Although Carl Mosk and Saito Osamu think that women married young, Hayami Akira

has suggested that, when daughters of tenant farmers migrated in search of work, they tended to marry late.2° Miyashita’s study of villages

near Osaka showed that the wealthier the family was, the earlier their womenfolk married.®*° In general, then, a woman’s age at marriage, like

so many other aspects of her life, appears to have been determined by the socioeconomic standing of her family. WIVES AND DAUGHTERS-IN-LAW

, Under ordinary circumstances, marriage marked the major metamorphosis in a woman’s life. Not all women had either the desire or the opportunity for married life, however. For the daughters of wealthy peasants, spinsterhood or divorce made it possible to live for oneself, not for others. For the poor, however, life without a husband was a matter not of choice but of necessity. In one household in the Hino region in the early 1800s, a mature unmarried woman continued to live in her natal home with her married brother (the family heir) because her father demanded her labor.*! Constrained by the family’s 29. Carl Mosk, “Nuptiality in Meiji Japan,” Journal of Social History 13, no. 1 (1980): 475, 484; Saito, “Population and the Peasant Family Economy,” 34—35; Hayami, “Myth of Primogeniture,” 9-11. 30. Miyashita Michiko, “Noson ni okeru kazoku to kon’in,” in Nthon joseishi, ed. Joseishi s6go kenkytkai, vol. 3: Kinset (TOoky6 Daigaku Shuppansha, 1982), 47-50. See Susan Orpett Long, Family Change and the Life Course of Japan, Cornell East Asia Papers no. 44 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, China-Japan Program, 1987), 28, for a summary of the

literature. The three daughters of Sekiguchi T6emon all married at age eighteen; see Nagashima, “Bakumatsu néson josei no kéd6,” 151. In Higashi Matsuyama from 1777 to 1877, age at marriage varied. between fourteen and the early thirties; see Higashi Matsuyama—shi no rekishi, 364. Mori’s detailed study of women in Taishid6 found that the youngest woman married at fifteen, the eldest at thirty-eight; see Mori Yasuhiko, “Bakumatsu ishin-ki sonraku josei no life cycle no kenkya,” pt. 2, Shiryékan kenkyti ktyd, no. 17 (September 1985): 159-61. 31. It6 Yoshikazu, “Shamon ninbetsu-ch6 ni awareta kinsei Tama no josei,” Tama no ayumi, no. 27 (November 1984): 9. In the novel The Doctor’s Wife (Tokyo: Kodansha In-

THE LIFE CYCLE OF FARM WOMEN 53 need for income, such women missed their chance for a family of their own.

Demographers debate the extent to which women married outside their natal village and the age difference between husband and wife. Here again, historical processes, regional variation, and diverse economic circumstances produced a number of peasant strategies for adapting personal trajectories to the rhythm of the preindustrial agricultural order. Regarding the first question, Richard Varner has argued that “spouse selection was restricted to within the village, for the peasants were generally opposed to marriages contracted with outsiders.” If the young men’s associations were to be strong, they had to enforce en-

dogamy.*? Laurel Cornell, in contrast, has shown that in one area in central Japan, most women went as brides to villages other than their own.*3 Mori Yasuhiko’s study of a village near Edo and Miyashita Michiko’s study of a village near Osaka demonstrate that the circle from

which marriage partners were chosen depended on the family’s economic interests: wealthy and influential peasants sought partners from far away, while poor peasants made more informal connections within the village, connections perhaps arising out of the nights when the young men’s associations and the girls’ room were allowed to merge.** Age differences between husband and wife also vary considerably. Near Osaka the difference was nearly ten years, a finding that supports the arguments of Cornell, among others.®> In contrast, the average age difference between husband and wife in one village near Edo was five years, and in the villages of Sagamihara it was almost nil. Among the poor at the end of the Tokugawa period were couples where the wife was older.*°

If the ideal marriage did not necessarily link couples who were close in age, it did link families of equal status and class. Detailed studies of

marriage patterns show that rich married rich, poor married poor, ternational, 1978), Ariyoshi Sawako describes two sisters who sacrifice themselves for their brother’s education. 32. Varner, “Organized Peasant,” 481. 33. L. L. Cornell, “Old Age Security and Fertility: A Microdemographic Analysis of the Difference Between Men’s Motives and Women’s,” Working Paper Series WP #7 (Indiana University, Population Institute for Research and Training, 1987). 34. Mori Yasuhiko, “Shamon-cho ni miru kinsei josei no life cycle,” Rekishi hyéron, no. 431 (March 1986): 35. Mori suggested that most marriages took place between families living within ten kilometers of each other, the distance that could be traveled both ways in a day; see Mori, “Bakumatsu ishin-ki sonraku josei no life cycle (pt. 2),” 171-73. See also Miyashita, “Noson ni okeru kazoku,” 51. 35. Cornell, “Old Age Security”; Mosk, “Nuptiality in Meiji Japan,” 475. 36. Mori, “Bakumatsu ishin-ki sonraku josei no life cycle (pt. 1),” 159-61; Osada, “Onna no kurashi,” 123-24. In between 18 and 19 percent of the families in the new field villages of Sagamihara, the wives were older than their husbands.

54 ANNE WALTHALL sometimes kin married kin, and families with sidelines that contributed significantly to the household economy found brides skilled in business management.®’ Marriage thus tended to reinforce economic divisions and social distinctions.°° This fact may have been advantageous to Japanese women, who, although typically entering their husband’s family as strangers and needing to be trained in the ways of their new home,

may not have been as intimidated and unprepared to assume new household responsibilities as Chinese women, who tended to marry into

families of higher status than their own and to be overawed by the power and wealth of their in-laws.®?

Futhermore, not all daughters left their natal families upon marriage. We have already seen instances of women from poor families stay-

ing with their parents even after marrying in order to help with the farm work. In cases where a family had sufficient property but lacked an heir, it readily adopted a son-in-law or even a daughter to carry on the lineage, for the continuity of the family name and the worship of

family ancestors was deemed more important than the perpetuation of bloodlines. Of the marriages in the area around Higashi Matsuyama, 15 percent involved the groom moving into the bride’s home, a figure compatible with the rates found in other areas.*° Adopting a son-in-law was often the first response to a crisis caused by the death of a family’s males.*! Male adoptions were far less likely to

result in a permanent union than taking in a bride, perhaps because males were less willing to adapt themselves to the customs of a different household, or perhaps because any man willing to be adopted already had flaws in his character that prevented him from maintaining an in-

dependent livelihood. As Jane Bachnik has pointed out, an adopted husband faced many of the same difficulties as a young bride coming into a house. If he did not get along with his new family, he was the 37. Mori, “Shimon-ch6 ni miru kinsei josei no life cycle,” 34—36; Long, Family Change and the Life Course, 24. Kumagai Kumie, “Modernization and the Family in Japan,” Journal of Family History 11, no. 4 (1986): 373, has asserted that people who married across

status lines were ostracized and transferred to the eta class. In one village near Edo, however, four women married samurai during the early nineteenth century without penalty; see Mori Yasuhiko, “Bakumatsu ishin-ki sonraku josei no life cycle no kenkyi,” pt. 1, Shiryokan kenkyi kiyé, no. 16 (September 1984): 168-71, 181-85; and pt. 2, 192—99.

38. Miyashita, “Noson ni okeru kazoku,” 52-53. 39. Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 42, repeats the conclusions developed by Martin C. Yang from his prewar fieldwork in China in A Chinese Village (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 107. 40. Higashi Matsuyama-shi no rekishi, 360-66; Miyashita, “Ndoson ni okeru kazoku,” 44. 41. Oguchi Yujird, “Kinsei koki ni okeru néson kazoku no keitai,” in Joseishi sog6 kenkytkai (ed.), Nihon joseishi 3:209-10, 220.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF FARM WOMEN 55 one to leave, even if he had already become the titular head of the family.*2

Records from other parts of Japan suggest that when a daughter stayed in the family, she functioned as the househead even though her husband might be given the formal title in official records. Hirose Chiyo from Eshima in Harima had an adopted husband, and she knew more about what was going on than he did. Like a modern career woman, she found herself holding down two jobs: domestic work and the family cloth-making business.*® She clearly had authority to make decisions in both realms. Although concern for the family’s future was the usual reason for bringing a groom into the family, in wealthy peasant families more emotional factors might also play a role. The Suzuki family in Echigo, for example, obviously used adoption to secure the future of its women. _ The family head in the early nineteenth century, Bokushi, adopted an heir and a husband for his daughter Kuwa and jettisoned his son Yahachi, born to his fifth wife late in his life. Before Suwa, his deceased son’s daughter, was twelve years old, she had received a number of marriage proposals, but her grandfather refused all of them. Then Kichisho, the third son from a prominent family a few villages away, was apprenticed to the Suzuki family. He helped out in the store and generally made himself agreeable. A year later he married Suwa when she was just sixteen years old, and a few months later Bokushi drew up a contract to establish Kichisho and Suwa as a branch family. Rather than allow his beloved granddaughter to suffer the vicissitudes of leaving the family, Bokushi sought to guarantee her future at the expense of the main house and his officially designated heir. Unlike her female relatives, Suwa had a chance to get to know her husband before the wedding. As Bokushi said, “He suits the family and harmonizes well. Since last spring we have drawn closer together.’*4 What did harmony mean in peasant families? Harmony was usually the bride’s responsibility and meant that she had to refrain from quarreling with the members of her new household, do the work expected of her position, and conform to family customs. Yet according to the precepts written for peasants by samurai intellectuals and the peasants themselves, the basis for harmony lay in the connubial relations of the couple itself. “The married couple is the foundation of morality. A couple is basically lustful, and if they get along, they produce a righteous 42. Jane Bachnik, “Adoption,” in Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983), 14—15; Miyashita Michiko, “Kinsei ie ni okeru boshinz6,” in Bosei o tou, ed. Wakita Haruko, vol. 2 (Jinbun Shoin, 1985), 28. 43. Miyashita, “Noson ni okeru kazoku,” 60-61. 44. Suzuki Bokushi no shiry6 shi, 26, 52, 60, 61, 62, 63.

56 ANNE WALTHALL harmony, but if they do not, everything falls apart.”*® Thus affection and social necessity went hand in hand, and herein lay the possibility of

intimate space for the married couple apart from the family. The author of Noyaku kiké (Observations of agricultural practices) suggests as

much in his account of an overnight stay at a farmhouse in the Kiso valley. ‘The newlyweds in his host family went to bed early and, separated from the others by only a screen, began noisy lovemaking. “Outrageous, exclaimed the guest, whereupon the old woman of the family got angry. “Harmony between the husband and wife is the basis of prosperity for the descendants. Rather than not have this auspicious intimacy, I permit their coupling day and night. People who laugh at their

passion are themselves outrageous. Get out!’’46 , Japanese peasant households may have maintained an intimate space for young couples even when no privacy existed because satisfaction of the couple’s needs was deemed the necessary basis for the harmonious maintenance of family and household. In cases of arranged marriage, a woman met her husband for the first time on her wedding day; if they were to work together for the rest of their lives and perpetuate the fam-

, ily, it was important to come to an understanding of each other as quickly as possible. The mediating factor here was lust, a passion validated in the practice of premarital night visits and evidently given greater latitude within the

Japanese peasantry than the military aristocracy, or, for that matter, the French peasantry. In France, there was not only no physical space for privacy (as in Japan) but also no intimacy. The married couple did not feel the need to be isolated in a room, nor was bed the place for sex. For French peasants, Martine Segalen has argued, sexuality was “less fundamental than it is today. . . . the success of sexual relations was less im-

portant than the success of the farm.” Therefore, “the notion of the couple has no great meaning in the nineteenth-century [French] rural family.”*” Ironically, while sexuality seems to have become more impor-

tant for a successful marriage in contemporary France, the reverse is true for Japan, at least in urban areas.*® 45. Shiga, Nihon joshi kydtkushi, 289.

46. Ibid., 292. 47. Martine Segalen, Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth

Century, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 49—50, 132.

48. Samuel Coleman, “The Tempo of Family Formation,” in Work and Lifecourse in Japan, ed. David W. Plath (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 192, points out that the current Japanese marital life-style places little emphasis on sexuality. Compare contemporary mores to the enjoyment with which rural men and women discussed sex in Smith and Wiswell, Women of Suye Mura, 61-67.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF FARM WOMEN 57 In addition to preserving family harmony, married women also bore a responsibility comparable to their husband’s for the family’s economic survival. Unlike samurai women whose sideline industries, if any, were always subordinate to and separate from their husband’s official duties, in peasant families women and men worked closely together. Generally women did the tedious and time-consuming work, whereas men did the work that was heavy and dangerous.*® Agricultural development in the

eighteenth century required peasant women to add handicrafts and field work to their domestic chores. According to a “Record of Customs”

(“Fazoku-cho”) written in Aizu in 1807, “within the last thirty years women have taken hoes and dig in the fields alongside the men, . . . and a really strong woman can work harder than a man.” Because women who worked in the fields dressed like men and left their hair unkempt, the sexes could not be told apart.°° Although women worked alongside men in the fields, they were not paid equal wages. “A Painstaking Record” (“Rytryi shinkuroku”), written in Echigo in 1805, shows that in the eighteenth century women were

paid half or less what men made, but by the nineteenth century their pay increased to two-thirds that of men. At rice transplanting time, when female labor was at a premium, they received almost a man’s wages. Even when women did the same work as men, however, their pay was less, possibly because the supervisors were male. Household work, including cottage industries that produced a cash income, was always valued less than a man’s work.®! Despite regional differences and

variations in the scale of the family enterprise, the opportunity for women to work alongside their men simply meant that they worked more. Women from wealthy peasant families, which tended to have more

members, did little or no field work, but they were expected to assist their husbands, supervise the maids, and look after the children and dependent siblings. They also produced cloth and worked in the family business. Suzuki Kayo, from a village near Tachikawa, spun silk and acted as a moneylender, even loaning sums of ten to twenty ryé to her own husband.°*? Suzuki Toyo, from Echigo, helped her husband in the crepe trade and spun thread whenever she had free time. When she was past sixty years old she made a piece of cloth and put the profits from 49. Nagashima Atsuko, “Kinsei josei no ndgy6 rod6 ni okeru ichi,” Rekzshi hyéron, no. 383 (March 1982): 53.

50. Sugano Noriko, “Noson josei no rddo to seikatsu,” in Joseishi S6g6 Kenkyikai (ed.), Nthon joseisht 3:63, 92.

51. Ibid., 68, 69, 76, 80-81, 86-87. 52. Kawano, “Koshi nikki ni miru bakumatsu-ki nanushi no tsuma,” 21-22.

58 ANNE WALTHALL its sale into a revolving credit association (tanomoshik6). Her earnings of five ryé, which she turned over to her son, Bokushi, helped him pay for

a new storehouse. “My old mother never used anything but the roughest of bedding,” he wrote, “but since the most important thing for business is a storehouse, she wanted it to be a success.’’®?

Committed to the prosperity of her family and her descendants, a farm woman expected no less than to work long, hard hours. But in the culture of marriage, a woman was more than a beast of burden; she was the helpmate of her husband. The precepts handed down from the ruling class may have emphasized a wife’s subordination to her husband

; and his family, but among the peasantry women held a more equitable position, one that even enabled them to talk back to their husbands, as did Tomi from Sagamihara in 1846. Her husband came home one night to find her absent, and when she appeared and he asked her what she had been doing, she replied, “None of your business.” They then started shouting so loudly that the neighbors interfered.*+ In a mountain village of central Japan, Ken, who had the reputation of being “strong-willed and selfish,” brought suit to investigate the murder of her brother by her relatives and village officials.°> Thus, although examples can surely be found of battered and downtrodden wives, there were also wives who

might be educated and independent, women who expected to be treated with respect. As Suzuki Bokushi wrote in his family history, “My

beloved mother had great integrity and quarreled with no one. Indeed, she never got angry but devoted herself to my father, and they worked together like the two wheels of a cart.”5° Most marital relations were so unremarkable as to pass almost unnoticed in the records; only descriptions of problem marriages expose the

assumptions regarding the expected role of wives. One example is the marriage of the wealthy Suzuki Bokushi in 1792 to a seventeen-year-old girl named Mine. Although good-natured and well liked, Mine had been separated from her mother while still young and grew up without any training in the art of household management. Her deficiencies in this area led the Suzuki family to return her and her baggage to her 53. Suzuki Bokushi no shiry6 sha, 21, 290.

54. Osada, “Kinsei noson josei no ichidanmen,” 29. For arguments supporting the position that women talked back to their husbands, see Kumagai, “Modernization and the Family”; and Smith, “Making Village Women into ‘Good Wives and Wise Mothers.’ ” In Snow Country Tales, Suzuki Bokushi asserted that “unless from time to time [a wife] speaks up in place of her husband, family affairs will be a mess” (50). Yajima Tetsu, a member of the samurai class, despised her husband, scolded him, and called him stupid; see McClellan, Woman in the Crested Kimono, 114.

55. Ozaki Yukinari, “Shinsht Saku-gun Makibuse-mura kenjo ikken,” Rekisht hyoron, no. 419 (March 1985): 45-66. 56. Suzuki Bokushi no shiryé shi, 21.

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Fig. 3.1. Survival rates for men and women

and women was about the same. Figure 3.1 presents survival rates from age sixty on for two groups: the set of women described above and the fifty-two men in Yokouchi from the same birth cohort who survived to the age of sixty. In both cases, at age seventy about four-fifths of the cohort was still alive; at age seventy-four, about one-half; and at age eighty, about one-fifth. Since lower mortality rates for women are a common feature of modern societies, this lack of a differential might suggest that and 13.5 for women in the village of Yubunezawa in the periods 1675-1740 and 17411796, respectively. A graph of the age structure of death in Shimomoriya from 1716 to 1872 in Narimatsu Saeko, Kinsei tshoku néson no hitobito (Kyoto: Mineruba Shobd, 1985), 76,

reveals a similar pattern. The expectation of life at age sixty-five for white females in the United States in 1800 and 1900, respectively, is given by Susan Cotts Watkins, Jane A. Menken, and John Bongaarts, “Demographic Foundations of Family Change,” American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 346-358, as 10.4 and 11.8; in the Yokouchi population, life expectancy at age sixty-five is 12.4 years.

:2 a,

THE DEATHS OF OLD WOMEN 79

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elderly women were systematically discriminated against and that female-specific geronticide was in fact being carried out. However, this hypothesis must be rejected, because a higher survival rate for women than for men is a pattern that typically appears with development, and is not characteristic of preindustrial societies. We do observe differential mortality when we compare currently married women with widows. In figure 3.2, the line portraying the percentage of surviving widows is lower at every age. Statistical analysis reveals that their risk of death was about 80 percent higher (p = .04). Yet while a widow in nineteenth-century Japan was more likely to die than

her married counterpart, the same is true of widows in contemporary Japan, widows in historical Europe, and, indeed, widowers. People who lose their usual social roles or social supports are, as Durkheim argued, almost inevitably more likely to die. One might argue that with her hus-

80 LAUREL L. CORNELL band’s death a Japanese wife lost her meaningful role in the household

and became a troublesome burden for her daughter-in-law.22 The higher mortality of Japanese widows, then, is not evidence that Japanese

peasants were carrying out geronticide. It is merely a general human pattern. HOUSEHOLD STRUCTURE AND MORTALITY

Let us now turn to the hypotheses proposed above. As you will recall, they suggest that the agent who creates the conditions for female geronticide is likely to be a woman’s daughter-in-law, for her interests are least likely to coincide with those of the elderly woman herself. One can examine these issues in three ways: first, by analyzing the effect of the presence or absence of a daughter-in-law; second, by looking at whether an older daughter-in-law has more power in the household relative to her mother-in-law; and third, by determining whether the presence of grandchildren strengthens a daughter-in-law’s hand. It is here that the experiences of Kyamon’s wife and Heinojo’s wife begin to diverge. Although both still had husbands at the age of sixty, the composition of their households was different in a significant way. Heinojo’s wife (the one who lived to eighty-nine) had experienced a family tragedy, for her eldest son had died at age twenty-five when he was already head of household. Luckily, her second son stepped in, took his place, and married. Thus, at sixty Heinoj6’s wife shared the house-

hold with her husband, her son, and a daughter-in-law thirty-eight years her junior. :

Kytimon’s wife (who lived to sixty-eight) also shared the household with her husband and her second son, the first having died in childhood. This son must have been something of a worry to her, for at thirty-five he was not married and never had been—an unusual situation, for most men, though they might later be divorced or widowed, had married by their late twenties. In any event, this son disappeared from our records of the household (probably an unrecorded death), leaving Kyimon’s wife with neither daughter-in-law nor grandchildren. Did such family circumstances affect the two women’s likelihood of survival?

| Daughters-In-Law The majority of women in this cohort (about three-fifths) were living with a daughter-in-law when they reached old age; a few had a co-resi22. A wife was essential to a husband, especially an elderly husband. See L. L. Cornell, “Old Age Security and Fertility: A Microdemographic Analysis of the Difference Between Men’s Motives and Women’s,” Working Paper Series WP #7 (Indiana University, Population Institute for Research and Training, 1987).

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THE DEATHS OF OLD WOMEN 81

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dent daughter who had taken a husband into the household; and about one-third lived with neither a daughter nor a daughter-in-law. In examining the effect of the presence of a daughter-in-law, we find the result to be the opposite of that anticipated. As figure 3.3 demonstrates, an elderly woman living with a daughter-in-law was somewhat more likely to be alive at every age than her counterpart without one. While this effect is not especially strong and does not reach statistical significance (p = .14), it suggests that women like Heinoj6’s wife were better rather than worse off. Age Differences

The hypotheses presented above also suggest that if there is a struggle for control between women of adjacent generations, women who are

8&2 LAUREL L. CORNELL close in age should experience it more strongly than others. Let us now look at how a daughter-in-law’s age, both absolute and relative, affects the older woman’s chances of survival. Strikingly, there is a wide age gap between elderly women and their daughters-in-law. Heinojo’s wife, for instance, was nearly forty years older than her son’s wife. The range for the entire cohort was twenty to more than forty years’ difference, with most daughters-in-law thirty to thirty-five years younger. Thus, a woman of sixty was likely to have a daughter-in-law between twenty-five and thirty years of age. This wide gap undoubtedly contributed to household harmony, for the two women were in such different stages of life that their interests would conflict relatively seldom.” Statistical measures show that this is true: for every year that a daughter-in-law was closer in age to her mother-in-law, the older woman’s mortality increased by about 9 percent (p = .03). Although the difference from year to year is not very large, it is cumulative. Thus, given two sixty-year-old women, one with a daughter-in-law of twenty-five, the

other with a daughter-in-law of thirty, we find mortality levels of 100 and 154, respectively; that is, the second woman’s level is about half again as high as the first woman’s. In addition, while life expectancy at age sixty for women with older daughters-in-law was sixteen or seventeen years, it was much longer, twenty-five years, for women whose daughters-in-law were significantly younger than themselves (aged nineteen to twenty-five). Thus it appears that an older daughter-in-law may have had some power to harm the elderly woman with whom she shared her household, and that choosing a younger daughter-in-law may have been advantageous. Grandchildren

A third argument that emerges from the literature is that although a bride entered the household with few economic and psychological resources, she acquired them as she produced children and proved her value. Thus the presence of grandchildren should have enhanced the daughter-in-law’s power and undermined the hegemony of the mother23. The age difference between spouses in Japan has decreased considerably over the last three centuries. The mean age at first marriage for men has remained about the same, but that for women has risen from under twenty to about twenty-five. As women become more comparable in age to their husbands, the age gap between them and their mothersin-law also narrows. This leads one to wonder whether the intergenerational conflict so widely reported in the ethnographies is a relatively new phenomenon, one resulting not only from the dilution of traditional household ideology, but from demographic changes as well.

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FEMALE BUNJIN 113 of women were receiving some training in Chinese, the kind of longterm commitment that Saik6 made was unusual. Quiet and withdrawn as a child, she was permitted to indulge herself thoroughly in her liter_ary and artistic pursuits, perhaps because her father, after losing his only son, lavished his attention on her and saw that she received a full Confucian education more befitting a male member of the samurai class. Ransai’s open-minded attitude and encouragement during her formative years were crucial to her adopting an independent life-style later on. Ransai’s deference to his daughter’s wishes even extended to the question of her marriage. When she was eighteen, he tried to arrange a marriage between her and a young man named Sh6sai, for he hoped to adopt a son-in-law as heir. When Saiko refused on the grounds that she was too deeply involved in her studies of painting, Ransai obligingly arranged for Shosai to marry SaikOo’s coquettish and outgoing younger sis-

ter. When Ransai retired three years later, Shésai inherited his fatherin-law’s position as physician to the daimyo of Ogaki, with its stipend of

one hundred koku. Ransai must have made special arrangements for Saik6, because her family continued to support her throughout her life, financing her lessons as well as her trips. In 1813, Saiko met another man who would wield great influence on her life as an artist. This was Rai San’yo (1780-1832), a distinguished poet and scholar, and the only man Saiko ever wanted to marry. Born

into a family of prominent Confucian officials in Hiroshima, in his youth San’yo was known for his brilliant scholarship and rambunctious

personality. The latter part of his life was spent in Kyoto, where he opened a private school. He became a major figure in the literati world, renowned for his Chinese-style verse and an innovative history of Japan entitled Nihon gaishi (An unofficial history of Japan), as well as for his calligraphy and painting. San’yO had been urged by a friend to visit the Ema household in order to meet her well-known father, but during his visit he was charmed by Saiko’s beauty and talent. He agreed to become her poetry teacher, and the following year he asked Ransai for her hand in marriage. Ransai refused for reasons that are not clear. It is generally believed that Ransai was oblivious to Saik6’s warm feelings for San’y6 and rejected

the proposal out of respect for her previously stated desire to devote her life to artistic pursuits. (Saik6 was supposedly absent at this time.) Ransai was also probably aware of San’y6’s history of dissipation and may not have wanted his daughter to marry a man of such character. When he found out that she favored the marriage, however, he sent someone to Kyoto to negotiate with San’y6, but by then San’y6 had already arranged to marry a woman named Rie.

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rie Tate irited leSal tt 1Ocor neresp alKO nd his wa neve 4 wire. roken, Vyo a arr Yr tell u aon spird imhi sen’ h Sa othe ied Heart f bot ach : n, an 'V0'S nd fri 1k6 wt is death. e ms w friend o toe: San They c ritten, ith.San y" -_ —~ m ° ry O In San ) ite pupus y les of ilv col vVOa ils un WO p alkO ection, : fa vorit 1 k 0 sending exam p a fami y his . h Sal O S Many 5 th e Em three

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de hisni corre resepo eKyot ever 1 ed byto er d ink are ; Oo onc anl ing in red i ure J.%. accomp ks 1icisms IS ne WO critic ag shownil 4in Saik6o tra andtSerall ed from t inve fi nned weeks °Bthe P . 8 ] r autu rang e ginning h spring of her s arding t l]re inpasse t8ler ears -Tais eriod Ss,oruSua ‘been Thegt over t ir jireg and unts rvant ve ritten d thei in the letters. sto = rl a . in eir S ies ha . ily w ot re 9 an al . lize -in rate yd, p iously 7, 1819, agge d San obvi 1817, ex ik6 an ize an . 814, : en tion vora . th: ip betwe e to nc li favo ’v6’s dea lation rs fe time ore : ship felt fre . area San yo initten autho own o bef Cer iinrips tain aul ven her Kyo ikd writ t ipto

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Saik6 made 5

FEMALE BUNJIN 115 one month. The main purpose of these visits was to meet and study with San’y6, as well as to view the celebrated Kyoto scenery. She went often

to San’yo’s home, where she formed a sisterly relationship with Rie. From the diary of San’yd’s mother, Baishi, we know that Saik6 accompanied San’yo and members of his family on many journeys, and that on several occasions she stayed overnight at his home. It is clear that they remained devoted to each other, and that their relationship went beyond that of teacher and pupil. They had a special friendship that blossomed over the years, and one could even surmise that a form of love existed between the two.

Nevertheless, rumors that San’yo and Saik6o carried on a romantic | affair after his marriage would seem to be unfounded. Saiko had been raised in a very strict and proper family, and it is unlikely that she would act in such a way as to offend the moral standards of the day. The fact that she was welcomed by San’yo’s family and colleagues, who praised

her for her quiet, gentle, and virtuous nature, suggests that she and San’y6 were not lusting after each other in secluded inns, as some writers would have us believe! San’y6 introduced Saiko to many Kyoto artists and poets, including

Uragami Shunkin (1779-1846), Nakabayashi Chikuto (1776-1853), Okura Ryazan (1785-1850) and his wife Yoshida Sharan (1797-1866), Koishi Teien (pen name Genzui, 1784—1849), the monk Unge (17831850), and Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783-1856). These people formed a kind of salon, providing an appreciative audience for Saik6’s work and stimulating her creative output. Over the years Saik6 became especially close friends with Shtran, another of San’y0’s female students. She also collaborated with Shunkin and his father Gyokud6 (1745-1820): in a painting that the three bunjin produced in 1814 during Saik6’s first visit to Kyoto, Saiko painted the rock and bamboo jutting inward from the

lower right corner; Shunkin did the chrysanthemums; and Gyokud6 contributed the landscape partially enclosed in a circle (fig. 5.5). Such joint endeavors were common in bunjin circles among individuals who shared similar sentiments about art and poetry. That same year, Saik6 also contributed a painting to an album that was compiled and presented to Gyokud6 on his seventieth birthday, and a woodblock illustration of one of her bamboo paintings was included in the 1814 Metka gafu (A book of paintings by famous masters). Saiko’s first visit to Kyoto was further commemorated by a poem written by Unge: 9. See, for example, Sakamoto Tatsunosuke (Kizan), Rai San’yé (Keibunkan, 1913) and Ichijima Kenkichi (Shunj6), Zuthitsu Rai San’ys (Waseda Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1925); also It6, Sazké to Koran, 174.

Fae MM se ‘Us : -—~ 4

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Fig. 5.5. Collaborative painting by Ema Saiko, , Uragami Gyokud6o, and Uragami Shunkin, 1814. Hanging scroll, ink and light color on paper, 118.4 X 28.5 cm. (Private collection, Japan)

FEMALE BUNJIN 117 Presented to Saiké Joshi from Mino while at a teahouse

This elegant, refined lady’s brush has the spirit of the wind; A delicately scented fragrance is emitted from her green sleeves. One flourish of ink results in bamboo on a round fan; Untainted by cosmetics, she 1s unsurpassed.

Over the years Unge, who was clearly a great admirer of hers, dedicated several other poems to Saiko.'° The following, written ten years later, 1s

indicative of the high esteem in which he and other bunjn held their colleague; it was presented to Saiko when she was about to return to Mino. Unge alludes to the fact that while in Kyoto she plunged wholeheartedly into the life of a bunjzn, but when she returned home, she had to adopt a more traditional feminine role: You entered Kyoto carrying a curved bamboo brush, Not interested in fashionable matters like applying makeup. You nonchalantly brushed a few bamboo and pale plum blossoms on paper And inscribed your superb landscapes with poems.

Before you depart, in this lingering candlelight, | Don’t refuse the farewell wine—let me fill your cup once more. Tomorrow you will leave with your cosmetic box— May the hazy moon in Mino call forth memories of our camaraderie.

San’yO made sure that Saiko was included in any bunjin gatherings that occurred while she was visiting, and over the years she made many group excursions with other artists and poets to scenic places all over Kyoto and Nara, such as Arashiyama and Yoshino. Traces of the friendship Saik6 shared with her colleagues are visible in such objects as a purse that she once owned, with inscribed poems by San’yo and Shunkin (fig. 5.6). San’yO urged her to consider moving to Kyoto, but any such hopes she might have entertained were dashed when her brotherin-law died in 1820; henceforth she was expected to remain home and help with the family. A poem composed by San’y6 when Saiko was about

to return to Ogaki after one of her Kyoto visits captures the spirit of their close friendship: A parting meal, low lamp—stay and enjoy it a bit longer; New mud on the road home—better wait till it dries. On peaks across the river, clouds only now dispersing; Strings and songs in the house next door beginning to fade in

| the night.

10. For Unge’s poems, see Akamatsu Bunjiré, ed., Unge Shénin 1k6 (Nakatsu: Gochokaku, 1933).

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